The Painful Truth Blog

I have the full book online now. I hope you enjoyed this sample! Please feel free to respond to the book here under this posting.

http://www.hwarmstrong.com/Faith.pdf

by Mary Ellen Humphrey

Chapter 5
Who can find a virtuous woman?
Proverbs 31: 10

The Women’s Meeting had begun exactly at 8 p.m.
Thirty-two women sat in a loosely formed circle in the
basement meeting room of the minister’s house. First
the minister’s wife stood up and everyone was suddenly
silent.
She held her Bible in front of her, briefly looked
around the room, and then started reading: “Romans 8
verses 16 and 17: The Spirit itself beareth witness with our
spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then
heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we
suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. My
name is Nancy and I am a Child of God,” she said, then sat
down.
The elderly woman next to her rose. “My name is
Alice and I am a Child of God,” she said, then sat down.
Around the circle the process continued. “My name is
Faith and I profess to be a Child of God.” “My name is
Madeleine and I am a Child of God,” an older woman said.
A young girl, barely twelve sitting next to Madeleine stood
up and quickly said, “My name is Ruth and I profess to be a
Child of God.”
“My name is Rachel, and I profess to be a Child of
God.” She blushed and sat down as quickly as she’d stood.
“My name is Desiree and I am a Child of God,” a very thin,
frail-looking, elderly lady said in a squeaky high-pitched
voice. “My name is Laura…My name is Marianne….My
name is Gayla…My name is Esther…around it went, until
it came to another teenager who stood, “My name is
Kathleen and I profess to be a Child of God.” She glanced
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around the room as if gauging the reaction and then sat
down.
From the eldest, Desiree, to the youngest, Ruth, each
took their turn rising and announcing who they were and
sitting back down.
“Welcome to the women’s ministry,” Nancy said, still
sitting. We have been instructed to read Proverbs 31
tonight. Each woman took her Bible and turned to the
designated passage. Nancy started reading, “Who can find
a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.”
Nancy nodded to Alice who read the next verse, and then
Nancy nodded to another woman and so on until they had
read the entire chapter.
“Does anyone have any questions?” Nancy asked.
Ruth, the precocious young girl with short naturally
curly blonde hair raised her hand. Nancy nodded to her.
“Did they sell girls back then?” Ruth asked.
“Excuse me?” Nancy said.
“It says her price is far above rubies. Does that mean
that girls were sold for rubies?”
Nancy frowned. “Well, in the Old Testament days life
was different. Sometimes the families of women received
dowries or compensation for losing their daughter when
she married. It was different back then.”
Ruth persisted. “But, does that mean it’s okay to sell
women?”
“If it’s in the Bible it must be okay,” Nancy answered
impatiently.
Madeleine, Ruth’s mother, pulled her daughter back
down to her seat and gave her a stern look.
“Shhhh…”.she whispered loudly. “You’ve asked enough
questions.”
Nancy looked around. “Any other questions?”
Esther, a young recently married woman raised her
hand timidly. Nancy nodded to her.
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“I am confused,” Esther said. “I was told that women
didn’t talk about their husbands’ service and yet I find a lot
of us seem to do that. What are the guidelines?”
Nancy studied her for a moment, and then answered
succinctly. “Women are to remain silent in The Church
and their husbands’ service is not to be discussed in any
way that might cause division or competition. We all
know that women tend to be very competitive, especially
in the services they seek. Not all are called to be leaders
or serve in higher roles.”
The young woman looked confused. “But I thought
seeking service was a godly thing and something we should
strive for?”
“Strive for silently,” Nancy stated. “We must not
gossip or criticize our husbands or any other man’s
service. Our whole role is to serve. Can you give me an
example of what is confusing you?”
Esther shifted nervously. “Well, at services, while
talking with Laura and Marianne, they were telling me how
their husbands were assigned to different tasks that didn’t
fit them and that they were sure it was a mistake, it would
be better to let them do the tasks that were more natural
and compatible to their talents and education.”
Nancy looked at Laura and Marianne who were sitting
beside each other, and now both women blushed
nervously. “You have asked a good question that allows
us to clarify gossip, Esther. It is not the place of Laura or
Marianne, or any of us to decide which position of service
our husbands hold. It is presumptuous of us to believe we
are wiser than those chosen by God to lead and make
these decisions. It is disrespect for authority and
disruptive to the good of The Work.”
Faith and Kathleen ritualistically studied their Bibles
every evening after dinner. They would spend half an hour
each morning in secluded prayer.
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Rachel saw this and wanted to comply as well. She
reviewed her notes from Mr. Robert’s sermon on
Saturday. She looked up each scripture he’d quoted, and
he’d quoted many scriptures.
One struck her, I Timothy 4:1. It read: “Now the
Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some
shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits,
and doctrines of devils.” Rachel decided to pray about it,
asking God to help her keep the faith and protect her
from seducing spirits and doctrines of devils.
She was sure that other churches, some of the very
churches that her mother had dragged her to in the past,
were in fact such seducing spirits and devils. It was all
beginning to make sense, despite the teaching that one
could not understand The Truth without the Holy Spirit
which was only available to true Children of God, attained
when accepted by the ministers and baptized. Only adults
could be members.
Rachel hoped to soon be baptized so that she could
receive the Holy Spirit and then fully understand The
Truth. It was her all-consuming goal and she studied her
Bible diligently.
On Wednesday nights, Jeanette, another Deaconess,
came by to pick the three girls up for the women’s
ministry meeting. Jeanette was older than Audrey, also
single, the product of a divorce from a nonbeliever. She
had left her two teenage children with her ex-husband
when she joined The Church.
This was Rachel’s third such meeting having attended
while at Audrey’s. The topic was once again Proverbs 31.
While all of these scriptures were well-known to most of
those present, to Rachel they were wonderful revelations
of truth. They were jewels she treasured. She couldn’t
get enough. The more she learned, the more she desired
to know about The Truth.
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When Esther asked the question about gossip last
week, Rachel took notice. She understood the harm of
gossip. She’d experienced it firsthand. Still, this was
different. What did the minister’s wife mean, women
were competitive? And what was this about service?
Were there roles specified for the brethren? Rachel was
curious and eager.
That Saturday, Mr. Critchett once again gave the main
morning sermon. He raged on about the roles of service
in the church. An hour into his sermon he announced that
two sisters had been suspended for gossiping about their
husbands. It was Laura and Marianne. Rachel was
astonished and puzzled. She realized that someone, most
likely Mrs. Roberts must have told the ministers about
their comments at the women’s meeting. She looked at
Faith and then at Kathleen who sat quietly and somberly.
“What does that mean, suspended?” she whispered.
Mrs. Andrews shushed them.
Faith whispered back, “it means they can’t attend
services for a while.”
“How long?”
Faith shrugged. “Usually three or six months,
depending on the severity of their bad attitude.”
All the women were somber that Sabbath. Their
usual bustle was gone. The hugs were a little harder and
more silent. It was as if they didn’t dare to speak lest they
say the wrong thing. Rachel struggled to understand this.
Pastor Roberts spoke in the afternoon about the role
of women in the church. Roberts pointed out that false
churches are referred to as whores in the scriptures. It
was Eve who seduced Adam leading to expulsion from the
Garden of Eden. But there was hope. It was faith. Faith
in God and his Truth would save women. Rachel was
determined to have such faith. She was determined not to
be one of these wicked women.
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Roberts lecture continued. Women were not
allowed to speak in the church. They must have long hair
as a veil to cover their heads. They must obey their
husbands who are the head of the wife. He quoted
scriptures that assured that women would be saved in
childbirth if they were faithful.
After the service ended, Rachel asked, “What does
that mean that women are saved in childbirth?”
“You’d better be faithful since medical care is not
allowed,” Faith answered.
“Midwives are okay,” Kathleen added. “But it’s hard
to find someone. They don’t like to do home deliveries.”
“There is a doctor some of the brethren use,” Faith
said. “But he has come under scrutiny since Marianne’s
delivery.”
“What happened?”
“She began to hemorrhage…they had to rush her to
the hospital. She didn’t want to go, but the doctor
insisted. He isn’t too popular I guess and since then he’s
been reluctant to deliver other babies at home.”
“Jeanette has helped several women,” Faith pointed
out. “She was a nurse before finding The Truth. She had
to give that up of course, being that we don’t believe in
doctors.”
“I never read about this in the literature,” Rachel said.
“Of course not. We shouldn’t be telling you all this.
You should hear it from the ministers. They know when
people are able to handle such information,” Kathleen said.
“I can handle it.”
“I’m not sure I can,” Faith answered.

by Mary Ellen Humphrey

Chapter 4
So the last shall be first, and the first last:
for many be called, but few chosen.
Matthew 20:16

Audrey was as excited for the girls as they were
themselves. They’d found their own apartment. She
wanted to hear all about it. “Thirty-five dollars? That
sounds a little steep for a one-bedroom, third floor
apartment.”
“Penthouse,” Faith said. “We have our very own
penthouse.”
“And with any luck, we’ll all have jobs next week,
too,” Rachel said.
Randy was sitting beside her on the couch. “There’s
no such thing as luck,” he said.
“What?” She looked at him puzzled.
Audrey explained that The Church doesn’t believe in
luck. It’s like gambling. Nothing is luck. Especially if
you’re a Christian. There’s a plan and purpose to
everything and it would be blasphemous to relegate
anything to simple luck. Better to be thankful to God for
providing the item.
“Oh,” Rachel said. “That’s very interesting. I’d never
heard that before. It isn’t in the Bible studies I did. I’m
sure I would have remembered that.”
“There’s a lot of stuff not in the Bible course,” Faith
said.
“Yeah,” Kathleen added. “Lots of stuff—lots of good
stuff.”
The three girls were so excited they could hardly
sleep. They whispered and giggled late into the night. The
next morning they were dressed and ready for church
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early. They thanked Audrey for her hospitality and headed
to Manchester, talking incessantly all the way there.
The official greeter once again hugged all three girls
welcoming them to Sabbath services. He didn’t pay any
special attention to Rachel anymore. She guessed she was
being accepted as one of the flock which was a nice feeling.
She belonged. Even though she didn’t like the hugs so
much, she liked the sense of belonging.
There were lots of hugs. As people got to know
Rachel, she was greeted by everyone, even the children,
with a hug. Sometimes even a kiss. Always a warm smile
and welcoming gesture. Women were the biggest
offenders. They hugged each other as if they’d been apart
for years, when it had only been a few days. Those who
lived close enough saw each other on Wednesday nights—
Women’s Meeting night. Rachel had attended her first last
week while staying at Audrey’s. From now on, she’d be
able to go every Wednesday night.
Of course, the official greeters hugged everyone at all
services. Rachel now understood their role went beyond
greeting. They were also screening to make sure no
uninvited people attended.
“Let’s go tell Wilma the good news,” Faith suggested
before the sermon started.
They approached the young woman who smiled
weakly at the three excited young girls. They began to tell
her about their apartment all at once. She waved her
hand. “Slow down. I can’t understand you all talking at
the same time.” The girls laughed. Faith explained what
had happened, how they had found an apartment on the
third floor–a penthouse apartment, and how they each
had jobs at a local manufacturing firm.
“That is great,” Wilma said. “Congratulations. It
sounds so exciting. I hope everything works out for you.
I wish I could join you.”
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The three girls stood awkwardly. Kathleen glanced at
Faith. But Faith didn’t have the appropriate response. She
shrugged.
“We wish you could, too,” Rachel said.
“Thanks,” Wilma smiled. “Thanks,” she whispered
again.
The sermon that morning was given by the local
pastor, Mr. Roberts. He was higher in rank in the ministry
than Mr. Critchett. He was his boss, actually, and usually
gave the first sermon of the Sabbath service. Most of Mr.
Roberts time was spent working with the two smaller
churches in Vermont and Maine, which weren’t large
enough yet to have their own full-time minister. This left
Mr. Critchett to tend to affairs in New Hampshire.
Mrs. Roberts, Nancy, whom Rachel had met that first
day she attended services, also led the Women’s Meetings
on Wednesday nights.
They had two children, James who was eight and
Justine who was eleven. These were the children Rachel
encountered her first service.
“The Roberts are both graduates of the college in
California and have been in the region for only a year,”
Faith explained to Rachel
“Faith is supposed to go to that college,” Kathleen
said.
Faith grimaced.
Kathleen was surprised by this reaction. “You aren’t
honored by that? Geez, I’d love to be chosen to attend.”
“Don’t swear!” It was Mrs. Andrews who was sitting
in front of the girls.
Kathleen blushed. Faith went on to tell Rachel, “Most
pastors and elders stayed in a church area for a few years
and then are moved to another location.”
“We like Mr. Roberts. I hope they don’t relocate him
too soon,” Kathleen said.
“Not soon enough for Mr. Critchett!” Faith said.
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Mrs. Andrews turned around and gave them all a dirty
look.
When she turned back around, the three girls sat
quietly. They might get away with such talk now but if
they were actually Children of God, they could be severely
reprimanded for it. Women had been suspended for such
careless words.
Faith whispered to Rachel, “Mr. Roberts will be
more interesting than Mr. Critchett,” she said.
Kathleen nodded, rolling her eyes.
After the hymns were finished and the prayer given, a
young man approached the podium to give the
sermonette. He had red hair and a ruddy complexion, was
thin and athletic. Rachel noticed Kathleen straighten up in
her chair and listen closely. She glanced at Faith who
nodded and whispered, “She has a crush on him.”
“Who is he?” Rachel asked. “He’s Joel.”
Kathleen frowned at them and Faith giggled. Mrs.
Andrews was sitting in front of them and turned around
and gave them a dirty look.
Faith looked down, embarrassed. Rachel looked in
another direction and Kathleen just ignored the old lady.
When Alice turned back around, Kathleen looked at Faith
and Rachel and rolled her eyes. The girls stifled another
round of giggles.
“Shhhh,” Kathleen whispered. “I want to hear him.”
Faith nodded to Rachel a see, I-told-you-so look.
More hymns and then the main sermon began. Mr.
Roberts started with a question, “What is Faith?”
He looked at the audience with confidence. “Do you
have faith?” he asked. “Turn to I Timothy 3:13,” he said.
Pages rustled. He waited for a moment, then read the
scripture: “But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and
worse, deceiving and being deceived. But continue thou in
the things which thou has learned and has been assured of,
knowing of whom thou hast learned them. And that from
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a child thou has known the holy scriptures, which are able
to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in
Christ Jesus.”
Mr. Roberts explained that faith was required for
salvation. He explained that they were chosen, a chosen
few, who had this wonderful gift to understand the
scriptures. Others were deceived by evil men, seducers,
religions that sounded like the True Church but were
actually clever counterfeits. He explained that the world
would only get worse and worse and that faith was needed
for salvation.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the
evidence of things not seen,” he said, reading Hebrews
11:1. “Do you have faith?” he asked the audience again.
Two hours were spent on the subject. Rachel was
glued to his words. She was hearing The Truth. The
Truth. It was soothing to her ears and to her heart. She
was sure she did indeed have faith. That was what had led
her here, to God’s true church. Her faith and her prayers.
Otherwise, she was sure; she would have given up long
ago.
Pastor Roberts turned to the Book of Revelation,
chapter two, verse thirteen: “I know thy works, and
where thou dwellest, even where Satan’s seat is: and thou
holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in
those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who
was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.” Verse
seventeen: “he that hath an ear, let him hear what the
Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh
will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a
white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”
And verse nineteen: “I know thy works, and charity, and
service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the
last to be more than the first. (Verse twenty)
Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because
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thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a
prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit
fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. (Verse
23) And I will kill her children with death; and all the
churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the
reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you
according to your works.” Roberts explained that God
knew their hearts and how dedicated they really were to
The Work.
He turned to James chapter two. He started at the
first verse, “My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons.”
(Verse 5) “Harkin, my beloved brethren, Hath not God
chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the
kingdom which he had promised to them that love him?”
(Verse 14) “What doth it profit, my brethren, though
a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith
save him?” (Verse 17) “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is
dead, being alone.” (Verse 19) “Thou believest that there is
one God’ thou doest well: the devils also believe, and
tremble.” (Verse 20) But wilt thou know, O vain man, that
faith without works is dead?” (Verse 24) “Ye see then how
that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.”
And finally, verse 26, “For as the body without the spirit is
dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
Pastor Roberts explained to the congregation their
duty to support the Work of God. He chided those who
claimed to have faith, but didn’t do The Work. “You must
give until it hurts,” he said. “Show God your faith by your
works.”
Lunch was sandwiches and soft drinks in the antiroom.
The three girls decided to take a walk. It was a
glorious late spring day. Rachel was excited by the
sermon. She’d never heard anything like it before. She
eagerly discussed it with Faith and Kathleen.
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“Wait till she hears about the Place of Safety,” Faith
said to Kathleen.
Faith left with her parents at the end of the day, so
she could pack her things and come to the apartment the
next day, Sunday. Kathleen went home with her mother,
too. Each girl was assigned to bring whatever they could
find to fill the apartment, beds, dishes, linen, mostly
donated by their parents and some of the brethren.
Rachel avoided her mother, but got a chance to speak
to her younger brother briefly. “How’s everything?” she
asked him.
“Not that you care,” he said. He instantly looked hurt
and guilty.
“Of course I care,” she said, looking him in the eye.
“We found an apartment,” she told him, changing the
subject. “We’re moving in tomorrow. Maybe you could
come and visit sometime, if you want.”
The young man looked as if he would start to cry at
any instant. She didn’t know what to say to him. She gave
him a hug. When her mother started their way, Rachel
left. She could hear her mother’s accusing voice as she
walked away. She tried in vain not to be embarrassed.
That night as Rachel lay awake, her last night at
Audrey’s, her mind raced with thoughts about her new
life. The new information—The Truth—was so
wonderful. Her new friends, Faith and Kathleen, and
especially Audrey. It all felt so good. She could hardly
wait for morning, which turned out to come more quickly
than most as she soon fell asleep.
Kathleen arrived early with her mother and her
mother’s station wagon. Rachel put her suitcase in the
back and jumped in. They both waved to Audrey as she
watched them drive off. “I can bring lunch,” Audrey called
after them, but they didn’t hear her.
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Kathleen’s mother had given her a full size bed and
box spring that was tied on top of the vehicle. She’d also
given them a set of sheets and two blankets, some odd
dishes and a few towels.
Rachel watched Kathleen and her mother interact in
the front seat. Kathleen’s mother spoke erratically, as if
her thoughts came faster than her words. Sometimes she
paused as if to allow her mind to catch up. Despite
Kathleen’s complaints, Rachel knew that Kathleen’s
mother loved her. She smiled. It was reassuring to her
that a mother could love her daughter. She hoped
someday she’d find that wonderful experience.
It didn’t take long to unload the station wagon.
Several of the young men and the Deacon who lived
nearby showed up just as the girls were struggling to get
the bedding up the two flights of stairs. They had the task
completed in no time.
Faith arrived with her father a little after eleven. She
had also brought a bed—twin size, and a bureau. Her
parents had thrown in two lawn chairs, two old lamps,
some dishes, and some pantry staples. They had bath
soap, dish soap, laundry soap, and cleaning stuff thanks to
Faith’s mother.
Soon Audrey arrived carrying a box of sandwiches and
a cooler of soft drinks. She included some cookies and
potato chips. The girls gave Audrey the grand tour. She
eyed the apartment doubtfully. The girls were unfazed.
The young men and Deacon left, as did Faith’s father
and Kathleen’s mother. They had other official church
work to do. Audrey joined the girls for lunch. They sat
on the floor in the living room where the mattresses were
temporarily set. You could hear the laughter down the
two flights of stairs and out onto the street.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Audrey said as she reached into
her handbag. “This came for you. I had to wait until
sunset to give it to you.” She handed Rachel a letter.
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Rachel saw that it was from her high school. It was a
large manila envelop and when she opened it there was a
hand written note from the principal. He said they had
wondered what happened to her and tried to find a
forwarding address. Enclosed was her high school
diploma. Tears filled Rachel’s eyes.
“Guess you must have completed enough course
work before you moved,” Audrey said.
Rachel smiled. “I can’t believe it. I graduated.”
Monday morning Faith dressed and left for work at 7
a.m. She encouraged both Rachel and Kathleen to come in
as early as they could to see about a job. The two girls
were there at eight. Kathleen went into the personnel
office first. She came out fifteen minutes later with a big
smile on her face. “I can start tomorrow,” she told
Rachel. “He said to send you in.”
Rachel went into the office. A thirtyish man sat
behind an old metal desk. He waved to a chair for her to
sit down. She complied. “So, you want to work for
Penacook Components Assembly?”
She nodded. “Have you graduated from high school?”
She blushed. “Yes.”
“Are you planning to go on to college or anything in
the fall?”
Rachel hadn’t thought about that. Fall seemed so far
away. But she did want to go to college. She’d always
wanted to. It wasn’t an option. Her hesitation raised his
interest.
“We don’t want to invest in training anyone who isn’t
planning to work long term.” He looked at her sternly.
“I don’t plan to go anywhere,” Rachel said.
“Can you start tomorrow, too, with your friend?”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of
course.”
“Good. See you then.”

May 17, 2011:

After spending $2,000 on rescuing my niece from the streets after her PCOG parents abandoned her, she no longer talks to us, unless the topic of conversation is about money. I believe PCOG intimated her parents, threatening them with “disfellowship,” unless they stopped their daughter from telling us about PCOG. Perhaps PCOG read her story posted on this website.

As far as I know, my niece is back “dating” the younger, classmate boy referenced in my first story. Side note: According to my niece, her PCOG mother accused this non-cult member boy of statutory rape, confronting him in the hallway of her daughter’s public high school. My niece is actually almost a year older than him.

Instead of accepting our offer to enroll her in a private preparatory school so she could pursue her stated dream of entering medicine, my niece has returned to her home State to waste her life with this bum, boy classmate, who has entered on his Myspace profile for “Occupation” — “never!” ” Under “Books,” he says, “Don’t read much either.” Under “Blurbs,” he writes: “I’m spontaneous, I’m a pacifist, I’m a hippie, I won’t lie, I won’t judge, and I can’t hold a grudge.” We had given my niece several hundred dollars when she left us. She said she needed this money to pay the nice family she was staying with, only to find out she was staying somewhere else, I believe with this bum.

From what I understand, they are planning on marrying. If she marries, she’ll follow in her mother’s footsteps, who, as a WWCOG member, ran away from home at 18 in the 70s and married a cult member, who told my father he was “wielding the sword to cut the family ties”, when announcing my sister was living with him and his loser parents. Years later, he was convicted of fleecing money from the elderly by creating a bogus desalination company in CA. Sound like HWA? He managed to swindle money from a famous actor. It is said he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff near Las Vegas before he had to serve his jail term. Even though they were WWCOG cult members, my sister and this creep divorced. He committed adultery.

The terrible legacy of WWCOG, HWA, PCOG continues to destroy lives and futures unless members, former members, and non-members take an active role in exposing the fraud. It is a moral obligation to judge evil people such as Herbert Armstrong, who committed incest while claiming to be chosen by God to prepare everyone for the “Second Coming” while reaching into the pockets of the vulnerable to take their money so he and his friends could live lavishly and continued to pursue their piggish ways. It is imperative to judge such evil. The risks are too great not to. If Herbert Armstrong, WWCOG splits, PCOG and all their supporters had their way, they’d end civilization.

-Keith Ace.

Much more in a day, or two.

May 21, 2011
– Elderly Mother Missing After Former World Wide Church of God Member Brother Uproots Her From Nursing Home and Philadelphia Church of God Sister Influences Her.

Yet another serious blow to my family — My former WWCOG member & brother, who wrecked our family by joining WWCOG in the earlier 70s, (He claims to have left the cult several years ago), took advantage of growing tensions between me and my 85-year-old mother over my PCOG sister, and I believe uprooted my mother from a nursing home in PA near us, and transplanted her to TX, where he lives. I also suspect my PCOG sister, referenced in the tragic story posted on this website regarding how she ruined my niece’s future, influenced and encouraged my mother to leave us. If so, he has done this without my knowledge. I found out my mother was missing from a former neighbor who tried to get in contact with my mother. Her phone line in the nursing home has been disconnected.

Instead of supporting me in stopping my PCOG sister from hoodwinking my mother for all these years, my former WWCOG member brother made every effort to exploit a crack opening between me and my mother, he being well-versed in deceiving, as a former HWA devotee, and a family-wrecker (His son has two illegitimate daughters, one of which has a Muslim first name). He learned HWA’s techniques well. It wasn’t enough that he took advantage of the rift, and moved my mother to TX. Before leaving, he and/or my mother somehow made my wife and I out to be the bad daughter-in-law and son for trying to help my niece (who wanted to split from PCOG) and for refusing to be pacifists regarding PCOG, WWCOG and HWA. Several neighbors, co-workers, all relatives, and former friends snub us. The relatives who no longer speak to us include my homosexual cousin whose former partner ran for some city government position and was caught soliciting an undercover vice squad officer. Made the newspapers of course. The other relative had an abortion. They are passing judgment on us. Typical.

Before my mother went missing, over the last few months, I had cut down on the number of calls, visits, and emails to her because she would never address the issues I raised regarding my sister taking advantage of herself and the alleged abuse of my niece via PCOG and her PCOG parents. Indirectly, my mother supported PCOG by sending my PCOG sister money for birthdays and letting her use her credit card when she visited. My mother refused to pressure my sister to compensate my wife the $2000 she spent on protecting our niece after her parents abandoned her to the streets for refusing to participate in PCOG. When we took my niece to visit my mother at the nursing home to tell her what had happened to her while in PCOG, my mother just sat there, stony-faced, and insisted she (my niece) belonged back with her PCOG parents despite all troubles they and PCOG had caused her.

My mother yelled at me the last time I saw her, upset as she was, that we had given my niece shelter over the summer when she had no where else to go. My mother ended by saying that it was wrong of me to have blocked her (my mother) from going to TX a year ago (which wasn’t true), and that as soon as she got better (she had a colostomy) she was going to TX. This, I took, as a veiled threat for me to keep quiet about PCOG, WWCOG, and how their vile influence was destroying us as a family.

Backtracking a bit, it was a little over a year ago when my cousin and her husband left us a nasty voice message containing outright slander and defamation of character statements alluding to us mistreating my mother (It is my understand their son is in a cult, the Seventh Day Adventists?). I played the tape for my former WWCOG brother. He never called this relative to straighten out the slander. His WWCOG wife wouldn’t even listen to the tape. I played the tape for my mother. She called my cousin to tell her she had gotten it awrong, but my mother remained in contact with this relative. Someone influenced my cousin to leave such a nasty message, thus I backed off from visiting my mother, while I tried to figure out who was defaming us. Around this time, my mother started thinking about moving to TX, either on her own, or I suspected with my former WWCOG brother and PCOG sister’s prodding. At the very least, they certainly didn’t’ discourage her. A few months later, I spoke with my former WWCOG brother asking him if everything was OK with my mother. He said “yes.” Less than a week later, he calls to announce his son had another illegitimate child (my wife and I don’t have children, so I believe this was a dig), and that our mother was moving to TX, and “whether I had any questions.” I was upset because I feared for my mother’s safety, her having anything to do with my deceiver and former WWCOG member brother who split apart the family. My wife spoke with my mother, and said I was upset. My mother changed her plans, and stayed. I got back in contact with my mother, overlooking this incident, and my wife visited her almost everyday at the nursing home. I called and visited her too, as before. My wife helped her with figuring out how to manage her colostomy bag. My mother gave the nurses credit for this, not my wife.

It all really fell apart when my niece came last summer, fleeing from PCOG and er PCOG parents. That’s when the family imploded. My mother yelled at me for no justifiable reason. I backed off visiting her, as my visits were obviously upsetting her, and she continued to support my PCOG sister. My wife, being unable to understand why my mother defends a dangerous cult, and is hostile toward us, when it was us who have helped her, not taking advantage of her. My wife and I don’t understand why, after my niece told her what had happened to her via PCOG, my mother insists on burying her head in the sand. My mother places her age and health condition front and center as a reason to avoid confronting my sister and former WWCOG brother and their membership in a dangerous cult, choosing instead to tell relatives, and whoever, that it is my wife and I who are wrong.

I ask to be removed as “executor” of my mother’s will. I said I wanted no part of being involved as her agent in transferring any money to PCOG through any money my sister might inherit. Cult experts advise never give money to any family member who is in a cult such as PCOG or WWCOG. My mother disregards this advice to the detriment of her grand-children’s future and to the integrity of our family.

I told my brother the correct way to handle the executor was to have a third party be executor of the will, not a family member. My brother refused to support me on this idea, and now is the executor of her will. My former WWCOG brother recently said he’d met a lot of “nice people” in WWCOG. We can only imagine his motivations of refusing to back the idea of assigning a third party, non-family member her estate executor.

My former WWCOG brother has smeared my efforts to support my mother and father all my life, when it was he and my sister who destroyed the family after he joined WWCOG. He never devoted his life in protecting his parents as I had, and therefore doesn’t believe I would. People accuse others of the crimes they themselves are guilty of. He took advantage of my mother’s growing confusion. Instead of clarifying reality, he and his WWCOG wife remain silent all throughout my struggles with my mother and PCOG sister duping my mother (She uses various health scares to gain my mother’s empathy).

My former WWCOG brother and PCOG sister make subtle, derogatory remarks about my deceased father, who objected to their membership in the WWCOG cult. My sister even posted derogatory poems on the internet about both her father (after he died) and mother. My father was a good man of character, wanting only the best for his children, and this is the way he was treated in life and after death?

My brother, after having never visited the family for but about 5 days a year since he joined WWCOG in the early 70s, (he called his parents less than a dozen times a year), exhibited greed when it came to emptying the contents of their house, in typical Armstrong fashion. He asked for half a train collection, ridiculing me for wanting to hold onto the collection, since it was me, not him, who as a youth, spent a lot of time with these trains building layouts, instead of holing myself up in my room listening to the likes of Gardner Ted Armstrong (Teddy the Fornicator), and incest committing Herbert Armstrong. He never once touched the train collection. It was with great effort that I had to convince my mother that giving him half the train collection was a mistake. She also wanted to give him half a book collection of classic books he’d never read, instead choosing to poke his nose in incest committing Herbert Armstrong’s “The Plain Truth,” “Mystery of the Ages,” and “End Times.”

When my mother had a colon resection about nine months ago, I rushed to the emergency room. I was just about to round the curtained-off area where she was when I heard her tell the emergency room people that she has family living nearby, but they (meaning my wife and I) don’t contact her. This is after my wife spent most of her lunch hours visiting my mother in the nursing home, helping her. My mother would rather throw us under the bus than have her former WWCOG son and PCOG member daughter exposed for destroying our family, among other transgressions.

So you can see by the example of our family’s history that the suffering, thanks to WWCOG and incest committing HWA, continues to escalate. These creeps and dangerous cults continue to destroy every shred that is left of our once hopeful and promising family.

Today, I’m not even sure where my mother is. My wife is very sick. She has to go to work every day in a lot of pain from a nerve problem that has caused frozen shoulder syndrome. I am told by a PCOG cult expert to be very careful, as some of its members could be “killers, ” as one “former member” has contacted us, claiming to offer help, but is elusive about who he is, and asked for our phone number twice. My wife and I live in fear of our lives while my relatives, former friends and some neighbors embark on a campaign of defamation of character, thanks to the misinformation or incomplete information my WWCOG brother, PCOG sister are probably spreading to throw smoke and mirrors over what they’ve done to destroy us. We want to know where my elderly mother is and whether she’s being abused, financially or otherwise. We want to know where my niece is and whether we can still help her pursue her dream of going to medical school.

Religious Prophets.

Family Radio’s Harold Camping, famous for his failed May 21, 2011 prediction, has been rushed to the hospital following a stroke. The Oakland Tribune wrote:

ALAMEDA — Harold Camping, the Doomsday radio preacher who sparked international media attention by predicting the end of the world last month, has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke at his Alameda home Thursday night.

The 89-year-old radio evangelist and president of the Oakland nonprofit Family Radio was taken by ambulance from his house Thursday night, a neighbor said, but his well-known, gravelly voice that led many believers to donate millions of dollars to his cause may never be the same.

Well, if we could have only got lucky enough for old Herbie to have been silenced when the first date he set failed to come to fruition!  But as we know, the old goat was not the first heretic when it came to religious charlatans. From some recent headlines we learn of other profit$ of doom.

Taiwanese ‘prophet’ may be sued over doomsday rumors.

Nantou County police, in central Taiwan, Thursday (May 12) moved to question ‘Teacher Wang’ who recently made a doomsday forecast on charges of spreading rumours that incited people to panic.

Teacher Wang, whose real name is Wang Chao-hung and a resident of Nantou County, foretold that a magnitude 14 quake and massive tsunami would devastate Taiwan on May 11, at 10:42:37am.

To prepare for the looming disaster, some of Wang’s followers rented vacant lots in Puli Township of the county and filled them with nearly 200 containers that were converted into shelters. They stockpiled daily necessities for emergency use.

The doomsday gossip, which was circulated online, has caused some people to panic. But it proved the doomsday prophecy was groundless, and nothing happened on May 11.

The police said that Wang may be detained for a maximum of three days or fined NT$30,000(US$1,000) for violating the Social Order Maintaining Act by spreading groundless doomsday rumours.

There are others.

Ex-doomsday followers fight for money back.

One of two civil claims brought against religious group Agape Ministries may be settled out of court. That plaintiff and another former church member, Martin Penney, are suing pastor Rocco Leo and two of his associates, Joe Venziano and Mari-Antionette Veneziano.

They want their money back, claiming they handed over more than $400,000 and $1 million respectively to the church based on lies about a doomsday scenario.

Jack Van Impe.

I know less than nothing about this character but he does call into account some of the glum doomsayers and false prophets: Jack Van Impe on false prophets. (Right click and open in new tab, watch for one minute or so.)

Jack call this time of the end a “Happy Time” not a time of destruction and judgment that the Armstrong brand of prophets and apostles declare. So what is with this doom and coming gloom? Well it has always been with mankind since the times they could write on bone or bamboo. It persists to this day using electronic media in the form of TV or DVD and of course, the Internet.

All this bad news is now put forth by only religious nuts either. Secular sources put forth their dribble as to dooms day. It’s a magnet and is amazing how susceptible people are to believing this doom and gloom crap.

Secular Prophetic Scum.

“The Population Bomb”

Paul R. Ehrlich, author of the above title, 1968. Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause a worldwide crisis. He came to this conclusion not through Divine Revelation but through Divine Equation, the liberal scripture of pseudo-science. Ehrlich ‘calculated’ using the equation I = P x A x T. This means that Human Impact (I) on environment equals the product of Population, Affluence and Technology. The conclusion was that in the decades of the 1970′s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death. Did it happen? Was he called on it? Read more HERE. Ehrlich later stated he was kind of right. Read the link I gave. You’ll learn something of value as to understanding his thought process.

Kenneth Watt, ecologist, said there wouldn’t be any crude oil left by 2000.
Harrison Brown, at the National Academy of Sciences, said the world would be out of lead, zinc, copper, tin, gold and silver by this time.
Michael Oppenheimer, author of “Dead Heat” in the mid 90′s, predicted global warming in 20 years. Opphenheimer predicted that “1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots . . . [By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” Despite the fact that “data from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shows that precipitation-rain and snow-has increased slightly over the century,” Oppenheimer has further said: “On the whole I would stand by these predictions-not predictions, scenarios-as having at least in a general way actually come true.” Just like Harold Camping and Herbert Armstrong!

But Wait, There’s More!

Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at England’s climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, said in 2000 that because of global warming, within just a few years “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is and flurries will be a very rare and exciting event.”

In the 70′s you could read in TIME or LIFE magazine that there would be no United States by the year 2000.

In the endgame there is nothing scientific about these predictions of failure for the human race. These “authorities” just make it up as they go along on their path of deceit and destruction.

To the current Armstrong member, you can ignore this current blog entry. Honesty and objective thinking is lost on you.

To those who have left the gulag of Armstrong-ism, let me ask you “why do you embrace the religion of scientific and/or political whores that puke forth heresies that entice you further down the road of another pseudo slavery?

Just who is it that you follow so blindly?

I don’t think about my childhood much.  It’s not that it was particularly awful or that I suffered irreparable damage it’s just that it feels unimportant.  Almost as if it happened to another person or it was a movie I saw once but can’t quite remember the details.  It somehow does not connect to me anymore, does not inhabit my soul the way childhood does in others.

But I do reflect now and then, dredging up distant memories like faded photographs blurred and distorted with time and age but still recognizable if you look closely enough.  If you squint just right, adjust the light the image will begin to make sense and you will find yourself saying, “Ah, yes, I remember now. I had forgotten.”

Upon recent reflection into the question of spirituality and what that means to me I found myself looking at some of those distant memories.  I can see myself as a young girl, hair brushed and held securely with a barrette, my nicest dress ironed and immaculate, my white socks and patent leather shoes, everything in its proper place nothing allowed to be out of order. I was sitting in a hard metal folding chair with my notebook and bible waiting for our weekly pilgrimage to “God’s House” to get underway.  Two hours of religious instruction in “the way” about to begin.   The ritual of prayer, hymns, and dutiful note taking that was a part of my weekly duties as a good daughter.  This weekly preparation to save my soul from the sinful and dangerous environment in which I lived known to me as “the world” as if it was a separate state or distant and foreign land was somehow going to keep me safe from the devil “having his way with me” as my mother said making it sound so salacious and almost sexually exciting to a newly hormonal young lady.

I was a good student.  I accepted this teaching because it was expected and it was all there was.  One way~one God.  However it never moved me, never swept me up into a feeling of grace, never inspired or delivered me from heartache.  I was told the answers before I was ever allowed to ask the questions.  In fact even the questions were picked for me and those that didn’t fit into the churches dogma were quickly discarded forbidden to further discussion.  I did what I did, believed what I believed out of fear.  Fear of punishment, fear of abandonment, and fear of not pleasing this God that was a jealous and demanding God somehow displeased with the human nature he supposedly created in his infinite and infallible wisdom.  Forever paying the price for the sin of the first man and woman, a debt that Jesus paid but somehow I still carried on my account.  The sin of individual choice, thought, and desire.  It didn’t add up (perhaps why I have always hated mathematics) but I went with it all out of fear.

Until in my seventeenth year of life having been freed from the church going experience since the age of thirteen when I left my mother and moved in with my father I stumbled on a book in the library about the history of witches and paganism.  Being the bad ex-Christian I was at the time I stole this book, which later I lost never to be recovered–my first lesson in karma.  For the first time in my life the words I read caused a physical and emotional response that had no trace of fear.  There was only a feeling of peace as if lost in a foreign land I had suddenly stumbled on a map I could read and understand.  There was in fact a spiritual world that seemed to fit me.  Although I liked the idea of this particular spiritual path I didn’t start to seek any real training or learning until my mid twenties.  I found myself surrounded by other young people who were drawn to Wicca and paganism as I was, but I felt out of place.  These young people dressed in costume flirted with witchcraft but didn’t take it seriously.  They were like children playing dress up, reveling in shocking and disturbing the status quo with their outlandish and heathen behavior.  They were emotionally unstable, personally unreliable, and some even dangerously intrigued by the idea of wielding magic to gain power over others, involved in practices I found to be morally questionable.  I walked away from these people and their playacting disillusioned and disgusted.  If this was Wicca I wanted no part of it.

Don’t get me wrong I still considered myself a Pagan.  I wouldn’t be running back into the arms of Christianity any time soon, but finding no community in which to grow, learn, and practice with that I could trust or even consider real I simply stuck to the central guidelines and forgot about pursuing any deeper commitment to the craft.  I rarely performed any type of ritual, I did not continue my studies, and I avoided most so called witches like the plague being completely disinterested in any drama or Hollywood type practices.  Most of the people I came into contact with became interested in magic because of a movie they’d seen expecting to find a magical outlet that would gift them with some sort of power they could wield over others.  Hogwash.  There is no power to be had over another only the power to enrich and expand oneself.  Those who seek to control, influence, or even “help” others without their consent are in my mind very dangerous and misguided individuals.

For the next ten plus years I existed in spiritual limbo.  I battled (mostly unsuccessfully) my chronic depression, wore my anger and cynicism like a suit of armor, used my humor and indifference as my weapons of choice, and generally just drifted through my life without really ever showing up to the event.  I was deeply sad as if in a state of constant mourning.  I felt completely disconnected from others and myself.  In the distance beyond the fog and shadows in my brain I heard a faint call.  So faint I decided it must surely be my imagination.

Imagine my surprise when the call began to get stronger, louder, and more insistent.  It was the same voice that spoke to me all those years ago at the tender age of seventeen.  The same invitation to leave my state of spiritual limbo and show up to life alive, in color, and present.  An invitation to come home only this time my Goddess sent me true guides in the shape of friends.  And so now approaching my fortieth year on this earth I resume a journey long ago abandoned, I exchange my armor of anger and cynicism for a warm cloak big enough to share with fellow travelers.  I keep my humor but turn in my indifference and select instead an open heart in which to house my many souvenirs, and set out to join the dance of life with childlike abandon and wonder, trusting that this time faith will sustain and inspire me instead of chain and punish me.  And I know I am truly blessed to have this time to continue my journey.

By Allen C. Dexter

I just read a very good article that precipitated a great deal of thought. I had to conclude that this insightful article was “right on.” You can find and peruse the same article right here.

This mind infection or meme doesn’t just afflict Christianity. It has afflicted the world ever since the first tribal seer, seeress, shaman, etc. concocted the first fantastic tale to explain worldly happenstances and their causes and why existence existed, thus inventing the first gods and/or goddesses and setting himself or herself up as an authority. Over time, set theologies, “holy” books and religious systems developed.

I wish I could say it’s been uphill from there,

It hasn’t.

Christian orthodoxy and fundamentalism is just another in a long line of orthodoxies and fundamentalist phenomena that can be traced back through history. There is really nothing that is truly new.

Once a priestly and governmental aristocracy comes on the scene, it has to find some way to keep the subservient masses under control. The officials of the ruling religion and/or government can’t be everywhere at all times. But – all seeing, all knowing gods can!

Beating the flock

Like mythical Santa Claus, they see you when you’re sleeping and see you when you’re awake, or so you are authoritatively assured. There is literally nowhere to hide. You either get in line or you’re toast – usually for all of a terrifyingly fictitious eternity.

Works beautifully on ornery little Johnny in the weeks before Christmas. Works rather well on big John too.

Just like the author of the article above, I was at one time a fundamentalist – a super-fundamentalist. When you’re adhering to the seventh-day sabbath and Bible holy days, clean and unclean meats, etc., I can’t label it anything but super-fundamentalism.

This statement resonated loudly with me: “As a fundamentalist you close your mind to anything but what ancient texts say. You only listen to certain things and filter everything through the lens of your chosen religion.”

I couldn’t state what happened to me in any clearer terms. I went from a skeptical teen-ager to a true believer basically overnight. It was like suddenly coming down with a virus. One moment healthy and vibrant, the next moment sick all over and feeling worse by the minute. I went from healthy skepticism to blatant unthinking fanaticism so fast that it took everyone, including me, by surprise.

This was no run of the mill virus I or people around me had developed defenses against. It was a new mutation! Cataclysmic viruses result when common viruses mutate and develop something new, like suddenly becoming pneumonic. British-Israelism, holy days, divine healing versus doctors and medicine, clean and unclean meats, etc., etc. I learned I shouldn’t even celebrate my birthday. It came upon me and overwhelmed me before I had a chance to really think.

Herbert Armstrong was a master at mutating the virus. He was also a master at keeping the old psychosis of fear dangling over our heads. He did away with the old “hell” and substituted an all consuming lake of fire that would probably vaporize even our ashes. He took away the hope of going to heaven and substituted becoming a literal son of God ruling over a coming perfect world. With a rod of iron, yet — not some little twiggy switch! That got the old adrenalin and testosterone flowing! Real macho message for really macho guys and gals who never before felt they had any real power! They could become GOD! That meant they could “call the shots” — for EVERYBODY!

Awesome! Or, as a particularly ridiculous verbal-ism that infected the group put it, “ghastly.” I have no idea where it originated, but I heard it first from the mouth of David Jon Hill when we went to see him off on the Queen Mary while we were stationed in New York. That was in 1961. Everything he saw that impressed him was labeled “ghastly,” which he pronounced somewhat British-like as “gawstly.”

Another statement I identify with states: “there is a certain thrill in suddenly ‘waking up’ and realizing you’ve been deluding yourself for many years.”

The thrill didn’t come on overnight. There was a period of confusion and bewilderment. It took a while to figure out just how deluded I had been. How deluded the whole damn world was! Despite there being obvious degrees of delusion, delusion is still delusion. Recovery involves a subtle, slow process, sort of like recovering from a serious infection. It takes a while.

How and why did this mind infection last so long – over twenty years in my case before I began to recover? Another statement gives a clue: “You slowly begin to grasp that the fundamentalist rituals you are using are designed solely to keep those delusions fresh and ever present in your mind so that you will quickly fall into line if you have doubts.”

We repulsed contrary thoughts by cliches and slogans we constantly heard and repeated. We were “in the truth,” contrary things were “abominations,” demons and demonic forces were everywhere and oh so powerful, questioning anything meant you were in “a bad attitude” or, horror of horrors, “unconverted.” The “world” was “Satan’s world” and we had to live in it but not be a part of it. The list could go on and on. We had a self-righteous, all-knowing answer for anything and everything. We walked around with that superior attitude and haughtiness I’ve since learned to recognize and abhor in other cultic and fundamentalist people.

This was reinforced by a constant round of listening to the World Tomorrow broadcast, reading the literature, compulsory attendance at weekly services and holy day observances where basically the same messages were hammered home and reinforced time after time. Every holy day, Herbert would ask the same question – “Brethren, why are we here?” and give the same answers, replicating and reinforcing the infection. We were constantly made to feel inadequate because there was no way to adhere to Herb’s formula of studying our Bibles an hour, meditating an hour and praying an hour. We were confident he did even though, if we had honestly thought about it, how in the world could he?

 

Worshipful sycophants

An aura surrounded Herbert Armstrong. An aura carefully created and nurtured by him and those worshipful sycophants who surrounded him. He was god-like in all our eyes. We all aspired to be as perfect and wise as he. That aura persists in thousands of spiritually diseased minds to this very day, in spite of all the salacious revelations that should have dispelled it long ago. The virus clouds their minds and doesn’t allow them to see what is so apparent.

How much of the original infection still remains is a good question. I’d like to believe that it has been totally eradicated. The disquieting thing is that the old virus is still back there sitting dormant in my mind and every once in a while, the old virus tape tries to play again. I have to bring myself up short and realize that I’ve thoroughly disproved all that nonsense.

It’s time to move forward.

 

 

Formerly known on the Internet as “Purple Hymnal.”

Among the thousands of articles posted here on the Painful Truth for your consideration, there will doubtless be some that you find useless, and possibly offensive, but we believe you will be perceptive enough to realize that even the stories you disagree with have some value in terms of promoting your own further self-definition and insight.

Pilate said unto Him, “What is Truth?”

 John 18:37-38, KJV

“There is an old Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’” – Leonard Nimoy

I’ve lived a lot, for one lifetime. My parents started out their lives together as hippies in Jamestown (I’m not sure where Wiki got the “St” part from, I’ve only ever heard it referred to sans honorific.), whereupon they proceeded to tick every box on the list, although neither one of them were involved with the Church then, beyond my father listening to the broadcast, which he had done, when he was in the Navy. (Beyond a passing mention that “Garner Ted wasn’t so bad” in the early ’80s, which I promptly scoffed at, my father never mentioned his early conversion much. Likely due to the source.)

Fast-forward a decade from “the hippie summer” and my parents are married with a one-year-old who spends more time in hospital than out of it (I have spoken of the false allegations of  “the healing doctrine” elsewhere), living in rural Northern Ontario, and oh yes, they were both baptized members of the Worldwide Church of God.

My mother was disfellowshipped (for a perfectly logical reason) between ’77 and ’78 by Mr. S. (whom can now be found beating the Bible (but never reading it, anymore) for a Pagan Christ, in a church with a cross on the front of it), and thus my family’s saga, as a “spiritually broken household” began.

I do want to go on the record and say that there was never any acrimony between Mr. S. and my family through the years, though; we got on, on very good terms, for many years afterward, even when we were in British Columbia, and Mr. S. was the rising star in the ministry. (He was the Western Regional Pastor at one point, I believe.) A star which has long since flamed out. Another minister, who was referred to behind his back by the more bitter members of his small, conservative, congregation as “little Hitler,” has now risen to the top of the “episcopal hierarchy” dung-heap that GCI is now under the thumb of. I also remember Mr. S. always spoke to each child as an equal, without ever condescending to us, no matter if we were two, or twenty; I remember this quite clearly, even though he was transferred from Toronto a year or so after I started attending services.

But let me tell you what I remember about the Church. My first Sabbath services, I was nervous, and fiddling with the fancy dress-up clothes that never seemed to stay free of foodstuffs, much to my mother’s chagrin. This being the “combined” congregation of Toronto, the East, West, and Central churches all met in the auditorium of the Sir John A, for many years — and it was busting at the seams, with at least a thousand members.

I can recount to you every step from the front door, down into the spacious auditorium, filled with a wall of sound and people (that would have impressed any average professing Christian churchgoer of the day), the 70s-era “Jetson Family” bathrooms with the foot-pedal-fountain in place of faucets and sinks, for hand-washing (ahead of the times, definitely), the classrooms where the YES classes were held every month (there was such a large contingent of children, the YES classes were separated, by grade level, each into their own classroom), and the patio out back, where the refreshments (usually unsweetened apple juice and digestive bikkies) were served. Along with tea and coffee for the adults.

I remember my surrogate “aunts” and “uncles” (not so in the “hardliner” Victoria, BC, congregation, where everyone was prim and proper “Mr. This” and “Mrs. That”), wandering around during fellowship hour with a gaggle of kids the size of which would scare the living daylights out of a modern security guard these days, given how well-dressed and well-behaved we all were. I remember the harsh Scotch mints handed out by the ex-Mennonite “grandma” of the congregation (who gifted me with a quilt I still have, somewhere hereabouts, almost fifteen moves and three provinces later).

Funny, although I can remember Neil Earle thundering so loud, we could hear him all the way back in “the cheap seats” way up in the back, even though he was the pastor of Toronto that I spent the most years under (as a child) I honestly barely remember him. I don’t think he ever visited our house. Certainly, neither he nor Richard Pinelli, ever came to my house and opened cupboard doors, “looking for sin,” as has been alleged of both of those gentlemen on false Christian sites like the “Exit and Support Network.”

There was always a steady stream of dinner guests from amongst the brethren, both ministry as well as fellow members, in Ontario, and British Columbia; my mother’s excellent (and kosher; the household was not quite that broken, fortunately) cooking certainly played an influence there; so, too, did her homemade wine, although I never did see Church members any more than tipsy.

In British Columbia, during the closing years of the Church holding fast to the truth, my family hosted NTBMR / NTBMO evenings where the local pastor very happily provided us with a list of all those who needed to be “placed” in a household for the evening some months prior, thus making both the local minister, and those in need of a place to go for the traditional meal, very, very happy. There are probably still legends circling the BC splinter groups, about those evenings. “Epic” is not even close to the appropriate adjective. People in the Victoria congregation would start talking about the coming year’s meal, after we all got back from the Feast.

The Victoria congregation met in a building called “the Union Hall,” which I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find information on the Internet about, to link for you. Still, I can retrace every single step, from the “back” of the Union Hall, the closest door to the auditorium, where the greeters stood and took attendance every Sabbath, to the YES classroom (only one), then the mother’s room, and finally the anointing room, all in a line, down one side of the long, narrow, hall, with the vending machines at the end; opposite were the bathrooms and the auditorium itself, full of spongy hardwood flooring that was probably original to the building, and didn’t creak nor crack, so much as give, like a slightly firm old-growth forest floor, beneath one’s feet.

Our first Sabbath services in BC (after six months of not attending; no, we were not put out of the Church in Toronto, nor was our non-attendance for that length of time an issue; we continued to keep the Holy Days while we were between Ontario and BC, traveling, and homeless, as we were at the time), I remember my father and I walking up to the greeters, shaking their hands, being marked off on the attendance sheet, and then walking through into the auditorium.

My first impression, after coming from a congregation that must have had upwards of a couple hundred kids (at least) ranging every age from nine months to nineteen years, was that there were no children in the congregation. All I saw were adults! I stuck close to my father, then, and we were dutifully introduced around, with a flurry of activity being conducted by one of the deaconesses, just out of the corner of my eye.

You know how they have that clichéd scene in those After School Specials, where “the new kid” is introduced into “the new school?” Yeah, so. Like that, only it was a circle of about twenty (if that) kids, ranging in age from about five to fifteen, gathered around my father and I, ringing us in, almost like they were going to bust out into a game of “Pocket full of Posies.” I would have been eight or nine at the time.

Things improved somewhat after that, thankfully, although the Victoria congregation was rife with cliques, to the point where it was preached about from the pulpit almost constantly. My parents tried to allay that, in their own way, through the Night to be Much Remembered meals, mentioned above.

I personally think they would have been wildly successful, had the Holy Days not been abolished, and the congregation disbanded, to go in directions we knew not where, until a chance meeting in a bookstore, a coffee shop, a library, a mall, or on the street, where the ex-member would loudly proclaim “We’re [insert x] now!” leaving my parents and I slack-jawed; after twenty-plus years of being told never to proselytize, how, exactly, does one respond to such flagrant disregard of Christ’s admonition?

Too, I couldn’t get over how these formerly righteous (OK the ones who barked the loudest were always the most self-righteous, and were likely a pox on whatever false idol-house they ended up worshipping in, anyway) brethren, could just drop everything, and depart so far from the truth, as if they had never, ever, believed.

I still can’t understand it, to be honest with you; and I’ve felt the same way, as a second-generation Christian, as an agnostic, an atheist, and now as a true Christian once again. All changes which came, for me, slowly, with much agonizing, planning, and careful thought; yet for my parents, and for these other wanton, pallid people, yelling meaningless, rebellious phrases, it was like flipping a switch.

Didn’t they even think about what they were doing? Did they even think about their beliefs, when they allegedly held them? (Obviously not, and they don’t want to re-examine them at all, speaking to those who have gone “whole hog” with “the changes.”) How could you forsake being a chosen member of the true Church? Sure, the Church forsook its members, but that was the leadership; the headship of the Church (whether it goes by the Worldwide Church of God, Grace Communion International, or any other name the “episcopal hierarchy” wants to assign to it, in the hopes that the truth will just go away) is still under Christ; the leadership of the Church just isn’t listening to Him!

In conclusion, I have personally found that a daily Bible reading program, has opened my eyes to the truth the Church once preached (that one day I pray, it will preach once again), and to the prophecy contained in that “NOW book,” for what direction the Church, both as a spiritual organism of scattered believers, and a corporate organization that still has the headship of Christ, regardless of how far from God its leaders have departed. Will it happen in my lifetime? That’s not for me to say. All I can say, is what the power of the Holy Spirit gives me to say.

Thank you for listening.

In memory of Becky Rush. August 2nd, 2003.

One of the “little people” in the Worldwide Church of God.

My top ten teachings of the Worldwide Church of God
that have screwed up my thinking.

1.  That “GAWD” wants me to get down on my knees, grovel a bit, and beg! his mightiness for my daily food, shelter and safety. 

I didn’t ask him/her to be born…and if there IS a god, why the hell WOULDN’T it take care of my basic needs???  What kind of sicko mind requires that of its’ creatures???  I don’t require it of my beloved fur-friends…  And how can I hold my head up when I am told that I DON’T receive the things I need because I either didn’t ask, ask properly, or because I need to learn some sort of lesson?

2.  That I am “Peculiar” and “Chosen” by the Almighty. 

Wow…doesn’t that one make me feel “special!”  HA!  Yup.  I’m SOOOoo much better than everyone around me…right.  Hey, if I’m so special, then how’s come I gotta grovel???

3.  Perhaps the most cruel one of all…”The heart is deceitful…(so much so that you can be fooled and not even know it!)…” 

The way they taught this made me doubt and mistrust even myself!  The very one I need to listen to, ME, is the one I’m told I cannot trust!  Well…then who AM I supposed to trust?  Them?  Gawd, thru them?  Or nobody?  This one has impaired my thinking more than I can say…it has affected every aspect of my life, making it difficult to get close to people, have friends and relationships…it has broken up beautiful loves and caused deep pain.  How DARE THEY!  How dare whoever? wrote that horrid book, the bible!!  Perhaps there IS some truth in being careful and questioning ones motives…but Worldwide Church of God used what could have been a GOOD tool to indoctrinate us into confusion and misguided loyalty to THEM!

Just because I’m away from that influence doesn’t mean it no longer impacts my life.  This scripture STILL comes to mind…at unwanted times, and causes trouble.  Working on stopping the recordings in my head…but it’s hard!!!

4.   “Gawd” will only give you what you can bear. 

Oh brother.  Sounds like the saying, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  Well, duh, yeah, I guess so!
But are you whole after going thru something terrible?  Aren’t you CHANGED in a fundamental way?  Aren’t you “weaker” than you were?  If I cut my arm with a knife every day, over and over, wouldn’t I be scarred?  Is a scar “strong?”  Or is it just a scar…indicator of trauma!  Who wants to be scarred for life?!  Not me, though I don’t see how I can avoid it, completely.  But the Worldwide Church of God seemed to believe that these “scars” are badges of honor!  Yikes. 

5.  You will be a KING in the NEW WORLD TOMORROW!  You will RULE over those “unwashed” millions…   

Thought there would be NO gender differences in the brave new world..?  And how can I become a “ruler” when I can’t even trust myself??  What trash.  Used to make me feel important…and hopeful…and eager for the new world order.  Thought I’d finally be able to make some progress and change, as one of Gawd’s elect and with his blessings…a little mini-god…HA!  But it didn’t do much for my everyday life here.. uh uh.  Just a wantabe…

6.  You will probably have to up and leave everything and everyone behind when it comes time to run to safety…and those left will probably have to suffer terribly from what is coming… 

Now gee…that sure makes me want to take off to Petra, doesn’t it you?  Yeah…leave kids, husband, pets, parents…whatever…to struggle thru something worse than has ever happened to anyone!  While I sit and bask in the glow of Herbert W. Armstrong and his henchmen…waiting for the glorious return and final battles…holy cow!  What a story line…  Used to cry myself to sleep with worry over my hubby and parents and sister…and I did a lot of groveling to the ceiling in the hopes that, by my hard work and near-perfection, they might be spared this.  What a heavy burden.

7.   The “Yellow” race is mean, heartless and cruel.  The “Red” race is shallow, spineless and lazy.  The “Black” race is shiftless, lazy, horny and uneducateable. Don’t marry them…don’t even have them for friends! 

Ok…talk about stereotyping!  That I’ve known “white” people to hold all of these traits…guess it doesn’t mean anything, huh?  But you know? To this day, these thoughts spring forth when I meet a new patient or person on the street…just for a nanosecond, yes, but there nonetheless.  I shove it back down…hard!  And force myself to keep an open mind…but it bothers me that it even surfaces at all!  Before the Worldwide Church of God, I believe I was as unprejudiced as a person can be.  Came from a family who didn’t have these ideas…but thanks to Worldwide Church of God, I learned them.  They made some sort of sense at the time…but only because I wanted them to.

8.   “Gawd” is so far above us…like we are above monkeys…that you cannot understand his perfect mind.   

Hmmm…    now there’s a sure way to keep me in my place!  Yup…just another little monkey…monkey see/hear…monkey do.  Don’t think, just shut yer trap and listen!!  You’re too dumb to understand the deeper things…so let us (ministers) do your thinking for you and we’ll tell you what to think-say-do.  Good recipe for fostering idiocy…  To this day, I will acquiesce to someone in authority…until I realize they may not be the sharpest tool in the shed…then I turn on the ole brain and figure things out for myself.  But, it still causes problems…

9.   Emotion, especially as they show in those horrid Pentecostal churches, is not Gawd’s way…don’t let emotion have a place in your life!  Stifle it!   

 I remember being told by McCrady that you need to place your emotions in a box, put the box on a shelf in a closet, and lock the door.  (Speaking figuratively)
My question?  If I’m not supposed to embrace my emotions, why do I have them?
This one has done a lot of damage…it has caused me to “stuff” a lot of things I should have experienced and dealt with.  And helped me to turn off my feelings towards others, sometimes with terrible consequences.  Sigh.  What a wonderful thing, our emotions.  Should they be controlled? Well, of course, especially those that could do harm!  But turn them off???  Some might say that isn’t even possible, but I am proof that it is.  Rigid and inflexible control is needed…takes a lot of strength and energy…but it can be done.  But the results aren’t pretty.

10.   The world’s problems are caused by sin, which entered the picture in the early part of the garden story.  Satan wasn’t able to fool the man…but he WAS able to fool the woman.  She is, therefore, the weaker vessel.. mentally. 

Oh, bullshit. Horse hockey.  Give me a break.  Couldn’t there be different spins put on this sordid little tale?  But, wait…ah…this is JUST the thing we might need to keep the little ladies in their place!  Yes!!!  It might just work!  (smiling madly and rubbing hands together…)  Yes. it did work.  As a “Christian” country, we’ve done our part to keep women in their place. at least according to the religious community.  Again, this has had an impact on my life.  Besides #3, this one has caused the most grief for me.  I thought I had to find the man the minister deemed good enough (whatever that was) and then take my place behind him…and stifle my own dreams, creativity, emotions…and be a helper to his higher agenda.  What a crock.  Does someone need to be “in charge” in a relationship?  In charge of what?  Of the other person??  Of their finances??  Of their very way of life??  Gee…I don’t know, but wouldn’t a collaboration make more sense?  Why does one person need to be in control?  Because they are afraid?

Well…I guess I could come up with more…and I may!   But I guess I got it out of my system, for awhile.  These things are hard to get rid of and I hate it that they are still with me…I believed this crap sooo deeply…and am ashamed now that I did.  But, at least I don’t anymore…sigh.

Well, what do you think?  Bunch o’ crap, huh?

Gittin unscrewed….Becky

Original article here.

A poem by Becky as she sought solace from the turmoil.

I’ve already told my story for others to read, but back in 1969, while I was a teenager, I got the “honor” to go to “God’s Headquarters” at Pasadena, California, and do my part to help God’s kingdom to come to earth. What I discovered in that short period was a level of arrogance and self aggrandizement that made me want to puke. Of course, being a teenager, I questioned this intensely and prayerfully, because I thought it was some shortcoming of mine that made me feel that way. I actually prayed with tears in my eyes, asking God to help me see the flaw in my understanding.

By the time I returned home, I was convinced that my prayers had been answered, but not in the way I had asked. They were arrogant and full of self congratulations on their ability to “overcome”.

I attended the home church more like a ghost than a real human being, waiting for a “sign”, anything that would show me the right decision. And then I started reading the works of Ernest Martin. There it was, my answer, my “sign”, my justification for the waiting and wondering, so I left, so happy, and oh, so free!

As I mentioned to James, this new-found freedom had good news and bad news. The good news was that I was free from all human authority systems. The bad news was that I was free from all human authority systems.

As a twenty year old whose hormones were raging, I was looking for answers. What to do, where to go, how to choose a mate, and if I do find a mate, how do I make her understand what I have learned about freedom?

I was free as I had never dreamed of being free, or perhaps even wanted, consciously. I was constantly tortured by a sense of loneliness, being cut off from any meaningful relationships or any way to even belong. Those whom I had considered friends were told to ignore me, as I was most likely demon possessed.

The good news: I was truly free.
The bad news: I was truly free.

Fortunately, a Local Elder named Larry Bathurst, who had also left the church, introduced me to the book by Eric Hoffer, titled “The True Believer”. I studied it over and over, until I could almost quote its contents from memory. I had not sought “God” as a teenager, but had merely been seeking a way to get rid of my “unwanted self”. It was, as Hoffer stated, a “passion for self-renunciation”.

To be free, in the sense I had discovered freedom, I could no longer “renounce” myself. Every decision had to be mine, along with the responsibility and outcome of that decision, and I had to accept that responsibility for myself.

A close friend began to pester me to join the marines. I was so alone, with such a feeling of helplessness, I began to rationalize. Why not? I was a weightlifter, in excellent physical condition. I could do twenty years, retire, and live off retirement at a fairly young age. What I was saying to myself unconsciously was, I won’t have to think. I won’t have to make life decisions only for myself. When my parents die, I won’t have to face life totally alone, with no one to understand me. I was making what psychoanalyst Erich Fromm called an “Escape From Freedom”.

But there was a problem I had not anticipated. Once you know something, and you know it to be true, your mind will not let you live in contradiction to yourself. I had tried to simply obey orders, keep my mouth shut, do as I was told. I didn’t want to believe in the marines, because experience taught me there was no need to believe in any human system of authority. “Just leave me alone. Let me do my job. If you want me to die for my country, fine, I said I’d do it. But don’t ask me to believe”. That was the thought that pervaded my mind from day to day.

It seemed the more I was determined to pull back within myself, the more the marines tried to pry open my mind and make me a believer. I stood before a promotion board one day, and was asked why I thought I deserved a promotion. I told them that to hear they way they talked to me for two years, I was obviously not qualified for a promotion, that I was lower than whale shit on the ocean bottom, and I was lucky I was tolerated.

“For two years” I told them, “I have been humiliated, intimidated, threatened, and constantly reminded of how useless I am. Why in the world would I want to treat others the way you treat me? I do not deserve nor do I desire a promotion in the marines, because it would just make me more like you”.

I had then learned, from two major organizations, that I did NOT want to be like them. The same question began nagging me: What, exactly, DO I want to be?

Not long after, my mother sent me a Christmas present. It was a book by Charles Reich, titled “The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef”. Yes, Charles Reich was openly gay. My mother didn’t know that. She had merely read an excerpt on the back of the book, and she said, “This is about you”.

On the back of the book was a statement toward the bottom, which stuck in my mind: “How do I become what I am not, and know not?”

In “The Greening of America”, Reich had described, in uncomfortable terms for me, his homosexual experience and his embrace of his own homosexuality. But in that book, he had also said that he was determined to follow the truth, no matter how lonely, no matter how long and hard the road. Reich was a Yale law professor, yet he admitted he knew little of truth, but he was determined to follow and find it.

I vowed to follow that same standard. Be careful when you set lofty goals. At some point, you will be required to see if you meant what you said. I was walking by “Sick Bay” one morning a few days later, when a voice behind me said sharply, “Marine!”.

We had been told this was a title of honor in boot camp. It was something we had to earn, and there was no right to wear it without hard effort. After I earned it, the only time it was ever used was for purposes of discipline and control. I began to equate ‘Marine!” with “son of a bitch”.

I turned to see a Lt. Colonel demanding to know why I hadn’t saluted. I answered that I never saw him. A corporal in my company saw it and used it as a perfect excuse for my spending a few months in what is known as Correctional Custody, which at the time made civilian prison seem like a vacation by comparison.

I explained my situation to my CO. It did no good. he was already “poisoned” against me by my refusal to accept a promotion. This was revenge, nothing more, nothing less. I was to lose two months pay and spend two months in Correctional Custody.

My company XO later cornered me in private and said “Look, Haulk, I know you got screwed over. But you knew you weren’t going to get away with spitting in their face”.

“I didn’t spit in their face. I simply said I didn’t want to be more like them.”

“That’s insubordination. You know we can’t tolerate that”.

“Apparently you can’t tolerate it anywhere in this country. Whatever happened to that freedom we’re supposed to be defending? Tell me that, Lieutenant”.

“Look, all I’m saying is keep quiet, take your medicine, and we’ll make it right. This is the system. I can’t change it”.

I remembered a similar statement by Mr McNair, who had come down to the local church to point out that “We dare not challenge Mr Armstrong. He’s God’s apostle. This is what has been established, and we have no right to challenge it”.

No one knows exactly what the truth is, but everybody seems certain that we have no right to challenge it, whatever it is. That’s when I quit the marines. Walked away, told them I was leaving. If you think leaving the church was traumatic, try leaving the marines.

Somewhere down the line, you have to decide who you are, what you are, and nobody else really has the right to tell you otherwise. I stayed away for eight months, and was brought back by the FBI, two men dressed in white suits. They were as big as the “Road Warriors” who used to be famous wrestlers. They were certainly not the Efrem Zymbalist types in black suits. I had no intention of arguing with them.

One quote kept ringing through my mind, from Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty, or give me death”.
Many marines had tattoos on their arms that said “death before dishonor”.

That was the theme of my defense at my court martial. I told them about what I had learned of Washington, John Adams, what I had read in “The Federalist”, and how I had come to believe just what Patrick Henry had said, and what the tattoo on those marine arms said. I told them sometimes a person has to stand for freedom, even if he has to stand alone, and even if he couldn’t really define it. Truth and freedom. A lot of good men had died for it, and not one of them had ever left a working definition for it.

And then a most amazing thing happened. The marines apologized and promoted me meritoriously. It was, for lack of any better word, in my mind at least, a miracle. The same CO who had sentenced me to Correctional Custody purely for revenge now took my hand in his and said “God bless you, Haulk.” I cried, of course. I wept uncontrollably in front of a lot of good men, officers and NCOs who shook my hand. More than one of them said, “Anything I can do for you, let me know.”

After forty years, I still have to ask myself, “What now?” Is there something to believe in, something bigger or better than myself? Was there a God who heard my prayer at that court martial? If so, why me? Why not a lot of other people who needed desperately to get an answer at a critical time?

Life really is about meaning and purpose, and you ain’t never going to find it in any mechanical, definable way. You won’t find God waving at you to show you that you’ve done the right thing. You can’t get there from here, and you won’t have any more of a monopoly on truth than anybody else, no matter what you believe. When you die, you will leave this world alone, and no one is going along for the ride.

If it could be reduced to rules and laws, we could program it in a computer, and consult our computer every day, but that won’t happen either.

The good news is, you’re free from human authorities.
The bad news is, you’re free from human authorities.

The conservatives and neoconservatives are rushing to establish a connection between “God and Country”. While there have always been some who tried to do this, there is a more intense desire, it seems, to “prove” that this country was based on Christian principles, in spite of the statement of John Adams that:
“As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion–as it has itself no character of enmity against the law, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen…”

There is yet the argument that somehow this government is directly founded on Christian principles. Madison, however, saw that in Christianity or in any religion, trying to govern by the “truth of God” was near impossible. As he wrote in “The Federalist”:

“When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated”.

The problem lay in translation and interpretation, as Jefferson commented in a letter to a friend:

“Differences in opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of censor morum over each other”.

It is not that the founders especially believed in Christianity, or in any other religion, as a direct authority for government, but that they saw religion as an agent by which power could be equally divided in the name of conscience. This need to maintain a “balance of power” among factions in government became recognized as the “Madisonian problem” as Madison agonized over in “Federalist #10″:

“The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states: a religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it, must secure the national councils against any danger from that source: a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project”.

We can conclude that Madison certainly never intended for any religion to represent the elimination of property rights. In fact, we can see from both Madison and Jefferson that both men intended that no “national council” could ever seek to overturn the property rights of people in the several states.

The “separation of church and state” which many claim is represented in the First Amendment, designed, according to Madison’s statement, to maintain property rights and discourage national power to override those rights. Both Madison and Jefferson were less involved with the ‘truth” of religion that with its ability to confound and separate people to the point they could not create “conflagrations” of power by using “paper money, abolition of debts, and for an equal division of property”, all of which we seem to have developed a taste for in recent times, not to mention the outright use of “paper money” with no Constitutional authorization.

The founders understood quite well that no person, especially themselves, had the knowledge or authority to speak for God, but they also intended that the government could, in no fashion, interfere with the free exercise of religion, not because they wished the government to be subject to God, but because they knew that no man could ever prove himself to be a representative of God.

As Madison wrote in the famous “Memorial And Remonstrance”:

“The religion then, of every man, must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man: and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate”.

While men may be subject to God, the state could never, in any sense, speak for God. None of the statements above show that the founders, in any way, intended for the state to claim power over any person’s conscience. They understood quite clearly that no belief in God could ever be reduced to state-endorsed rules.

While the right to worship God was permitted, it was intended as a counter-measure to the power of the state, but never to be subject to controls other than those chosen by the people themselves as individuals. More than the state, and less than the God in which they believed. Mankind, in the eyes of the founders, consisted of more than rules and laws. Mankind was made in the image of something which he could not define, but had the right to seek and desire.

This is not so much about Obama as it is about politics and economics in general. In order to understand what’s going on, some history is in order. This is intended as the first of two parts, building a foundation of economic ideas, and leading into the kinds of change produced by electronic technologies.

One of the great influences on economic thinking in the decades after the founders in the United States declared independence from England, was Adam Smith’s book on capitalism, entitled “Wealth of Nations…”(the title is longer, but everybody recognizes this one).

While the economic leaders praise the “invisible hand” of which Smith wrote, there are some statements he made which seem to cancel the effectiveness of that invisible hand of free competition. For example:

“…after the division of labor has once thoroughly taken place, it is with but a very small part of these with which a man’s own labor can supply him. The far greater part of them he must derive from the labor of other people, and he must be rich or poor according to the quantity of that labour which he can command, or which he can afford to purchase”.

Smith has just pointed out that to control wealth, one must control labor. The more who work for your goals, the more you can control the degree of wealth and control over others.

“The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it, and means not to use it or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities”.

Money, in this context, is merely the exchange medium by which all economic transactions occur. You can either produce it by working yourself, or you can extend you power by finding ways to control the process by which other produce it for you.

“Labour was the first price, the original purchase money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased, and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command”.

So, quite simply, if you wish to be wealthy, you must find a way to organize and control the wealth of others so that enough of it is directed to you, for your own pleasure. Capitalism, as Smith defined it, made it necessary to develop ideologies to support the idea of wealth, but those ideologies could not try to define ideological goals beyond the accumulation of wealth for its own sake.

Such ideas as “free competition”, “free markets”, and “Invisible hand” became the catchword of the culture, along with something that later gained ascendancy; “Social Darwinism”.

If Smith demonstrated the need for some guiding ideology, he left a vacuum by declaring that “success is succeeding”, a tautology. The religious force that gave impetus to this notion was the doctrine of Calvin, that the one who is “elect” before God can demonstrate that election by being blessed with worldly riches in his efforts. These two ideas, combining free markets and free competition with the idea that Gd blesses those who are financially successful, created what was later known as the Protestant Work Ethic.

This was a strange doctrine by which one could demonstrate that his “works” are blessed by God, even though he was already predestined to be saved in the first place, which pretty much made his “works” unnecessary. “God helps those who help themselves”.

As Richard Tawney writes in “The Rise of Capitalism”:

“What is significant, in short, is not the strength of the motive of economic self interest, which is the commonplace of all ages and demands no explanation. It is the change of moral standards which converted a natural frailty into an ornament of the spirit, and canonized as the economic virtues habits which in earlier ages had been denounced as vices. The force which produced it was the creed associated with the name of Calvin. Capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology”.

Further: “Capitalism, as an economic system, resting on the organization of legally free wage earners, for the purpose of pecuniary profit, by the owner of capital or his agent, and setting its stamp on every aspect of society, is a modern phenomenon”.

If labour is the full purchase price of all wealth, wrote Tawney, it is “not merely an economic means: it is a spiritual end….So far from there being an inevitable conflict between money-making and piety, they are natural allies, for the virtues incumbent upon the elect- diligence, thrift, sobriety, prudence-are the most reliable passport to commercial prosperity. Thus the pursuit of riches, which had once been feared as the enemy of religion, was now welcomed as its ally.”

How about “Think and Grow Rich”? Or more familiar, “The Seven Laws of Success!”? Or Norman Vincent Peale, who praised our “divinely ordered capitalist system” and “The Power of Positive Thinking”?

Tawney continues: “The true cause of industrial warfare is as simple as the true cause of international warfare. It is that if men recognize no law superior to their own desires, then they must fight when their desires collide”.

Karl Marx saw this weakness in Smith’s presentation, and realized that if money is the “universal equivalent” of all things, then every single value, of labour, of faith, of every effort, could be reduced to money. Everything, said Marx, was exchangeable for money, but a thing is exchangeable, wrote Marx, only if it is alienated from the individual, when the individual sees more value in the exchange than in the thing itself.

If everything could be transformed into money, said Marx, then the human being could be alienated from every single value he considered basic. That was Marx’s realization that the “so-called inalienable rights and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them break down before money”.

Marx then proposed “centralization of credit in the hands of the state”. A central banking system. This would create what Marx called a permanent revolution. Equality would become the passion of the masses, and the masses would never be satisfied until all barriers are broken down, and everyone is equal. Where all are equal, all are “alienated” from the basic goals and needs, such as property, that once made them individuals. Humankind becomes subject to planning and re-distribution. What was “God” if not an ancient tyrant who brought more war and hate than love and peace? Religion is the opium of the masses.

The unfolding of world events began with Adam Smith, who presented the flaw of his philosophy, which was seized by Marx, who promoted socialism and communism, the “red-headed step-child” of capitalism. Both are the creations of a mechanical era. What is now emerging is the dynamics of an electronic age, in which all events occur at near light speed, connecting us in one worldwide grid, changing all the rules.

We pause today to celebrate the American Worker to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for building a strong, innovative and vital country.

Read more.

This article is a re-print from Bill Fairchild, a Painful Truth Contributor.

Billy Joel published a song with that title in 1975. The song is melancholy, and is about a New Yorker who is sorry he moved away and is longing to get back to the Manhattan he so sorely misses.

I used to dislike New York City. It always seemed dirty, over-crowded, crime-ridden, and filled with endless traffic jams and so many mentally unstable people.

I have been to Manhattan several times on business trips and personal vacations, and have had my mental stereotypes reaffirmed by some people there but have also have my prejudices upset by other New Yorkers who seemed genuinely friendly, caring, and like real human beings.

I have a much different opinion now. All of a sudden, I am proud of New York City and its people. On television I see men wearing hard hats who are working 12-hour shifts to remove the 1,200,000 tons of rubble that used to be the World Trade Center that now lie in an ugly heap on top of what used to be 6,000 human beings. Those emotionally devastated emergency workers, many of whom have suddenly lost dozens of close friends in one stroke, are forcing themselves to keep working. They will stay at it until they break down. Hooray for their indomitable spirit! I am proud that New York City is a part of my homeland, and that I am privileged to live in a nation that has a place as fine as New York City.

New Yorkers have proven worthy of their giant guardian, the Statue of Liberty. I still get goose-bumps when I read Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” that is carved on its base: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

I am also terribly proud of the men who attacked the hijackers on the plane that crashed into rural Pennsylvania. I doubt that any plane can be hijacked in the United States now. There would be dozens of passengers swarming all over the hijackers within seconds.

An often told joke was that New York City was a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. I want to go visit New York City even more now, to share in the pain of those who are suffering, to experience the enthusiasm and resolve evinced by those who are cleaning up so they can start to rebuild, to do my part in stimulating that area economically by spending tourist dollars there, to tell strangers there how proud of them I am, and to be inspired by their heroic examples.

But I have to admit that I want to live there even less than before. I would be proud to live there if I had to, but only if I had to, because I think that that great warren of high-rise office buildings, subways, tunnels, and millions of people have become a very dangerous place to live and work. And those who could move away but choose to continue living and working there are also heroes simply for staying put.

The devastation caused on September 11 by a small gang of psychopaths should be a mind-jarring wake-up call to the whole world of the dangers of crazed religious cults. Those of us who have come out of the fanatical religious cult called Armstrongism should be painfully aware that what Al-Qaeda did on 911 is the same that we could have done if Armstrong’s cult had been allowed to continue growing unchecked.

Every person on earth needs to read “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. If we all read it, then perhaps a few may be plucked from the fire of endemic cultism. Hoffer wrote this book in 1951, long before the Worldwide Church of God became prominent or a hundred-million dollar a year engine of fraud. He certainly wasn’t writing his book just about Herbert W. Armstrong’s cult. Yet when I read this book in 1974 and when I reread it this year, almost every page seems to contain a warning about HWA and his cult.

The full title of Hoffer’s book is “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.” Hoffer discusses common traits found in those who start mass movements, those who lead mass movements, those who become the top lieutenants in mass movements, and those who join mass movements at the bottom level. He also discusses the life cycle of mass movements – how they are born, how they grow, and how they stagnate and die.

I urge everyone reading this web page to read Hoffer’s excellent little book. As you read it, think of the following, for they are all examples of the mass movements he had in mind when writing it: the Roman Empire, Christianity, Islam, the Crusades, the Salem witch hunt, the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the anti-Tsarist revolution in Russia in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s fascist Italy, Japan’s warrior society, Armstrongism, Gandhi in India, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, McCarthyism, all American religious revivalists (e.g., A. A. Allen, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, Pat Robertson), National Organization for Women, hippies, Mao’s cultural revolution in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Jim Jones and the People’s Temple, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, Aum Shin Rikyo in Japan, Promise Keepers, Heaven’s Gate, the Solar Temple, and the New Age movement.

Not all the movements I mentioned above turned out bad. Hoffer discusses how mass movements can end up being a positive change in humanity as well as becoming destructive.

Here are some quotes from Hoffer’s book that relate obviously to HWA’s gigantic fraud disguised as a cult disguised as a church that I hope will whet your appetite to read the whole book:

• “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die …, breed … fervent hope … and intolerance, … demand blind faith…
• Faith in the future renders us receptive to change. … All mass movements are interchangeable [explains how fervent cultists can easily jump from one cult to another]. …
• We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or … “to be free from freedom.” … a proselytizing mass movement must break down all existing group ties if it is to win a considerable following … the inordinately selfish …are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness [think about HWA, GTA, and their hideous excesses]…
• All mass movements deprecate the present by depicting it as a mean preliminary to a glorious future, a mere doormat on the threshold of the millennium. …
• A deprecating attitude toward the present fosters a capacity for prognostication … the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine …
• To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy … those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others … stripping each human entity of its distinctiveness and … turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgment of its own … a homogeneous plastic mass that can be kneaded at will. … the leader of a mass movement … relies on miracles … mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil …
• Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil…
• In the phenomenal spread of Islam, conquest was a primary factor and conversion was a by-product. …
• The main requirements [for a mass movement's leader] seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; … and, above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants [like all the evangelists, Raymond "Mr. Loyalty" McNair, Gerald Waterhouse, Rod Meredith, etc.]
• There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts. … the atmosphere of an active movement stifles the creative spirit.
• The fanatic is also mentally cocky … the conviction that life and the universe conform to a simple formula …
• In the eyes of the true believer, people who have no holy cause are without backbone and character … fanaticism … was a Judaic-Christian invention.”

If anyone wants to let someone else do his thinking for him, he should remember Auschwitz, Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the plane that nose-dived into the soil of southwestern Pennsylvania. This is where religious fanaticism ends up – death, destruction, and thousands of survivors grieving for those who are lost and wondering how could so many people believe such insanity. Anyone who thinks he has found an infallible leader, knows the absolute truth, or is on a mission from God should reflect on where such ideas can lead. Religious fanaticism and cultism can easily lead to lying to oneself, lying to others, murder, mass murder, and mass destruction. All cultists, extremists, and zealots need to think about the missing 6,000 people and the missing World Trade Center, put themselves into a New York state of mind, and think about what their zeal may lead them to do.

Peace.

Bill Fairchild Douglas, Mass. 09 OCT 01

In 1974, just before I left the WCG, I picked up a book called “EarthWalk” by Philip Slater. I had never had such an eye opening experience before that time. “EarthWalk” was one of the most profound books I’ve ever read.

Recently, I was reading from his blog, http://philipslater.wordpress.com and discovered the essay on the trap of purity. It is related to much we have discovered when we left the CoGs. A part of that is quoted below:

“But all cultures have safety valves that help release the tensions created by this twisting of our genetic makeup. Cultures survive only when they’re impure–when they accumulate inconsistencies and contradictions like lichen on a rock.
Medieval Europe, for example, had a Feast of Fools, during which nobles and peasants exchanged roles, priests were the butt of practical jokes, and all the usual taboos and rules of deference to one’s superiors were abolished for a day. Similarly, the Japanese have a tradition that anything said while drunk must have no repercussions in their daily lives. Since people are more complex than any system of ideas, these contradictions and inconsistencies are necessary for a culture to survive. As Mumford put it:
‘This tendency toward laxity, corruption, and disorder is the only thing that enables a system to escape self-asphyxiation.’  Some early Christian leaders, like Paul, portrayed celibacy as the highest good. But if this principle had been enforced for everyone the Catholic Church would have disappeared like the Shakers, who never reproduced themselves. Mumford attributes the longevity of the Catholic Church to its ability to absorb contradictory traditions:
“It is not the purity of Roman Catholic doctrine that has kept that Church alive and enabled it to flourish even in a scientific age but just the opposite.”
It survived, he says, because of the many ideas and practices ‘seeping in from other systems of thought and other cultures,’    especially that of the Greeks, and later, of science. Not to mention the pagan elements (Santa Claus, Christmas trees, Easter eggs) incorporated into the Christian religion as it swept through Europe.”

Slater’s description above opens up the idea that cultures cannot survive by being totally “pure”. By focusing exclusively on perfect obedience to a set of rules or laws, they eventually go extinct from lack of adaptation. Slater brings out a parallel to this idea in “EarthWalk”:
“There is a cybernetic law that states that the more probable a message is, the less information it provides. The information contained in a message, for example, decreases with its repetition”.
What we see, then, is a comparison between the “probability” of a message, and the “purity” of a message. By emphasizing the purity of a message, that is,  the “truth” of an unchanging nature,  we increase its probability, but we reduce the information it contains for useful adaptation to the world around us. If any “message(Catholicism, Mormonism, any ‘ism’)” is repeated to the point that we cannot accept variation, we will lose our ability to adapt to necessary change.
If you compare this to my last essay regarding genes and the “Cambrian Explosion”, you will notice a parallel between the action of genes and the need for “purity” in any social system.
What Richard Dawkins calls the “genetic replicative algorithm” is an action by which genes perfectly copy themselves from generation to generation by controlling as much of their environment as possible, to avoid change. That is, the genes select a process of “purity” to ensure that no alterations occur in their replicative process. If the “memes” of a culture are extensions of the genes, then we can easily see the evolutionary connection between a culture seeking “purity” and the gene pool seeking to avoid change and thus control its replicative environment.
What we see in both the culture or religion, and the process of genetic replication, is that “information”, that which lacks predictability, is a threat to both genes and cultures. This means that cultures, as extension of the genes, will seek to minimize choice, or options that threaten the reproductive integrity of the culture.
What is immediately realized from this is that religion is a process developed naturally in evolution, and, while it serves purposes of survival in environments with little change, it threatens the life of species in environments with what economist/futurist Robert Theobald called the “Rapids of Change”.
Religion, as generally recognized, is nothing more than a cultural evolutionary strategy to reduce stress within a culture by reducing its options. The more “purity” maintained in a culture, the less uncertainty it experiences, and therefore less stress.
Slater has shown a link between genetic replication and the strategy by which cultures avoid uncertainty, by pointing out the basic law of information theory. The more probable a message, the less information it contains. The more “religious” a person is, therefore, the more adept he or she becomes at strategies that avoid constant change. This suggests that religion is merely a useful evolutionary strategy. Once we become aligned with a “universal truth”, we are inclined to seek out those who agree with that truth. “Purity” can only succeed if it proselytizes. Slater continues below:

“Cultural systems force living things into boxes. Inconsistencies create air-holes that allow these living things to breathe. Every cultural system must have contradictions in order for its participants to remain human,  because human beings are inconsistent and have contradictory needs. We’re active and passive, organized and impulsive, aggressive and gentle, cooperative and competitive. Yet every cultural system tends to suppress some part of that complex humanity.
So when a culture changes,   it eases the process if parts of the older tradition survive, even when–especially when–they contradict the values of the new one. Vestiges of the joyful celebrations of life and nature that characterized pagan cultures softened the impact of the death-oriented, otherworldly Christianity that was imposed on Europeans during the Dark Ages. Easter eggs, a pagan fertility symbol, helped Christians feel that there might, after all, be something to be said for life here on earth.
Healthy cultures are packrats. They don’t throw away anything. They keep odds and ends of customs that contradict their dominant values.”

Slater has again pointed out another parallel of cultures and genes. Once a culture is “informed” with inconsistencies and aberrations, it isolates them often by putting them in jail, placing them in therapy, putting them in mental institutions, or ways that isolate the aberration, but maintains the “information” provided by the aberration or inconsistency. Organisms have this same tendency by incorporating what used to be called “junk DNA”, which, as Dr Sharon Moalem points out, are actually former viral DNA, which the organism uses for future reference. This DNA provides a kind of “database” which the organism can use in many ways, from “jumping genes” that randomly populate newly formed brains, allowing greater individuality, to reference of the viral DNA to create defenses against new viral infections.
In that same sense, cultures act as “packrats”, storing inconsistencies and aberrations as a “database” to study and identify the nature of each behavior, just as the immune system “tags’ and identifies each new viral invader and neutralizes it in the body.
Slater then makes comparisons to more modern cultures:

“Communist bureaucracies could not have functioned at all without the system of official bribery carried over from Czarist days, and capitalists who are most dogmatic about free markets are the first to seek government subsidies and try to control prices through collusion. Ceremonious Brits adore making fun of pomposity, and materialistic Americans are addicted to sentimental movies proclaiming that the best things in life are free. In 1635 the intensely utilitarian Dutch went mad over tulips–the most useless of plants–paying astronomical sums for a single bloom and almost destroying their economy. And while the early 1950s were notoriously obsessed with planning for future success, the most popular song was “Che Sera, Sera.”
When an old cultural system begins to give way to a new one its inconsistencies come under attack. There is an increase in fundamentalism–a call for ideological purity. These are seen as attempts to shore up the old system, but they actually weaken it further.”

In Jewish history, the Jews were faced with this same problem. They were allegedly commanded to obey the laws of God perfectly, and avoid the “leavening” of other nations. That is, they were not to be “informed” by the inconsistencies and paganism which other nations offered. How could the Jews successfully live among other cultures if they were not permitted to conquer and control those cultures? If they truly had the covenant with God at Sinai, why wouldn’t God have led them to victory over all other cultures, so they could enforce their truth on the world?

The reason, assuming there was a God who did so, is stated above. Had Israel been successful and enforced “God’s law” all over the earth, the very purity by which Israel was forced to live would actually destroy the evolutionary ability to adapt and grow with their environment! Israel’s “success” could not have depended on the conquest of other nations and a world ruling kingdom, since that very success would have doomed them to eventual extinction!
The Jews, therefore, offered an interesting solution: while maintaining the “purity” of their holy text, the Torah, they began to record a system of rules and laws(Mishna, Gemora, and Talmud) which allowed them to adapt to the cultures and societies around them, even incorporating various ideas from those cultures, while maintaining the “purity” of the Torah only by giving it “lip service”, the very thing which Jesus had allegedly condemned in his ministry. “Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men(Mark 7:7)”.
In genetic systems, there are the “germ cells” which maintain the “purity” of sexual reproduction. These cells are not altered by viruses. The basic information necessary for sexual reproduction is passed on, and the organism maintains its identity in a species. The somatic cells, however, are influenced by viruses, and can be altered by the “information” provided by viral DNA. The Jews had maintained the “germ cell” purity of the Torah, but had created an adaptive “somatic cell” system composed of the Talmud, which allowed them to adapt to the “cultural DNA” of other civilizations.
Christianity and Islam followed much the same model, by creating a “DNA” of print, allowed by Gutenberg’s printing press, which passed on the basic replicative information of the “germ cell”, while allowing for the constant speciation and splintering of interpretation of various religions, until we have thousands of religions that provide for constant adaptability in the West today.
The main difference, however, is that individuals can read either Bible or Koran for themselves, creating even more individualist diversity for competition and adaptation among systems. Notice what Slater proposes as a result of this “informing” process:

“The Protestant Reformation in Europe was an attempt to ‘purify’ the Catholic Church of its contradictions and compromises with paganism. It sought to suppress the cult of the Virgin Mary and reestablish the supremacy of the Father–to make Christianity a more perfectly patriarchal religion and de-sacralize ‘Mother’ Nature.
The result of this new purity was to weaken popular commitment to Christianity altogether. Atheism and secular humanism grew rapidly, and European churches never again held the sway over public life they’d once had.
The power of kings, which in medieval times was limited by the nobles and hedged about by custom, reached a peak under the reign of France’s Louis XIV, who detached the nobles from their land base and brought them to Versailles. As continued by Louis XV and Louis XVI, it was the purest form of monarchy that ever existed in Western Europe, and for that very reason was the beginning of the end.
Centralized power achieved an even purer form in the 20th century dictator. The dictator had no limitations at all–no concerns about legitimacy, no traditional obligations attached to the role, no restrictions based on custom. The dictator was authoritarian power at its absolute purest, and hence an unmistakable symptom of its decadence. Nazi Germany’s Third Reich–the purest and most perfect expression of Control Culture that ever existed–lasted only twelve years. And today the former Axis powers are three of the most vital democracies in the world.
The purest forms of a social system always appear as it decays. Often, when a system is ailing, its believers try to strip away its contradictions, leaving a system that is more pure, more rigid, and hence more fragile. Mao Zedong couldn’t tolerate the “laxity, corruption, and disorder” in Chinese communism. By launching the Cultural Revolution–trying to strip away all traditional values and entrepreneurism–he smothered the system and opened the door to capitalistic and democratic reforms.
In a viable culture, customs, ideas, and myths may fall into disuse, but they’re never thrown out. Cleaning out the cultural attic means junking the counterpoise that keeps the whole structure from getting too one-sided and collapsing.
The ‘purification’ efforts of fundamentalist ideologues are symptomatic of terminal illness. Radical leftists in the past have often crippled themselves through the same egoistic devotion to ideological purity, preferring to go down with the ship singing “nearer to the left than thee” rather than share a lifeboat with conservatives and compromising liberals.
Mumford’s “laxity, corruption, and disorder” is an ironic phrase, but it’s the way contradictions are viewed by ideologues. Purists believe they’re trying to ‘revive’ or ‘revitalize’ a system when they call for a return to ‘basic values’ or ‘fundamental principles’, but since it’s the “laxity, corruption, and disorder” that protect a system from self-asphyxiation, they’re in effect smothering it. They’re more committed to the idea of the system than the compromised reality. They’re not only willing to go down with the ship, they’re willing to sink it to prove their devotion.

Slater has correctly analyzed the problem, but the “neoconservatives” and the evangelicals are trying desperately to “return” to a purity which the United States never possessed, nor was it born of such ideas. The “original intent” of the founders was basic to the paradigm examined above: for those who chose, the Bible could be used as the “germ cell” of future security, but the nation grew and prospered on its “laxity and disorder”.

The creationists think they found evidence for God in the Cambrian Explosion. Because distinct species “suddenly” appear adapted to their environmental niche, creationists argue that surely an “outside” hand organized this life.

The Cambrian Explosion is defined from Wikipedia:
The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation was the relatively rapid (over a period of many millions of years) appearance, around 530 million years ago, of most major phyla, as demonstrated in the fossil record,[1][2] accompanied by major diversification of other organisms, including animals, phytoplankton, and calcimicrobes.[3] Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude (as defined in terms of the extinction and origination rate of species[4]) and the diversity of life began to resemble today’s.[5]

This sudden origin of life resembling today’s over a rapid period has been used by creationists as “evidence” of God. In fact, there is no such evidence, and studies in science are proving more to be so.

In fact, new evidence strongly suggests that this quick formation of species actually come from needs of our immune system, resulting in sexual reproduction as a means of “screening” random genetic mutations.

The idea of sex as resulting from needs of the immune system is called the “Red Queen’s Hypothesis” as stated in this Wikipedia entry:

One of the most widely accepted theories to explain the persistence of sex is that it is maintained to assist sexual individuals in resisting parasites, also known as the Red Queen’s Hypothesis.[5][10][11]

“When an environment changes, previously neutral or deleterious alleles can become favorable. If the environment changed sufficiently rapidly (i.e. between generations), these changes in the environment can make sex advantageous for the individual. Such rapid changes in environment are caused by the co-evolution between hosts and parasites.”

“Hosts” and “parasites” are explained simply enough. For example, my body, “me”, becomes a host for a “parasite” such as a virus or bacteria, which, over time, actually becomes part of “me.” Continued in Wikipedia, below:
“Imagine, for example that there is one gene in parasites with two alleles p and P conferring two types of parasitic ability, and one gene in hosts with two alleles h and H, conferring two types of parasite resistance, such that parasites with allele p can attach themselves to hosts with the allele h, and P to H. Such a situation will lead to cyclic changes in allele frequency – as p increases in frequency, h will be disfavored.”

Selection of one system over another, simply by matching pairs of alleles in a genetic system. A majority of one type will gradually select over another type, creating “patterns” that lead to developed species over time. Back to Wikipedia:

“In reality, there will be several genes involved in the relationship between hosts and parasites. In an asexual population of hosts, offspring will only have the different parasitic resistance if a mutation arises. In a sexual population of hosts, however, offspring will have a new combination of parasitic resistance alleles.”

A combination of genes as in sexual reproduction grants more diversity, but this very diversity actually allows for more protection in our immune system. A mutation of a “parasite’ such as a virus or bacteria is limited in the damage it can do, because sexual reproduction causes variations within the gene pool of a species. A mutated virus may enter our bodies, but the genetic differences created by sexual reproduction limits the damage done to us as a species.
Quit simply, over time, this constant battle and interchange among host and parasites, creates a selection process, in which a “survival strategy” emerges that limits the effects of random genetic mutations of viral or bacterial infection. Back to Wikipedia:
“In other words, like Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen, sexual hosts are continually adapting in order to stay ahead of their parasites.

Evidence for this explanation for the evolution of sex is provided by comparison of the rate of molecular evolution of genes for kinases and immunoglobulins in the immune system with genes coding other proteins. The genes coding for immune system proteins evolve considerably faster.[12][13]

…. It was found that clones that were plentiful at the beginning of the study became more susceptible to parasites over time. As parasite infections increased, the once plentiful clones dwindled dramatically in number. Some clonal types disappeared entirely. Meanwhile, sexual snail populations remained much more stable over time.[14][15]

In 2011, researchers used the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a host and the pathogenic bacteria Serratia marcescens to generate a host-parasite coevolutionary system in a controlled environment, allowing them to conduct more than 70 evolution experiments testing the Red Queen Hypothesis. They genetically manipulated the mating system of C. elegans, causing populations to mate either sexually, by self-fertilization, or a mixture of both within the same population. Then they exposed those populations to the S. marcescens parasite. It was found that the self-fertilizing populations of C. elegans were rapidly driven extinct by the co-evolving parasites while sex allowed populations to keep pace with their parasites, a result consistent with the Red Queen Hypothesis.[16][17]

Critics of the Red Queen hypothesis question whether the constantly-changing environment of hosts and parasites is sufficiently common to explain the evolution of sex.”

In other words, sexual reproduction caused a genetic diversity from generation to generation, but acted to stabilize the species over time, both limiting random change and protecting against excessive damage from random mutation.
In fact, the very exchange of viral information over time caused each organism to select certain genetic information over other information, with constant competition cancelling out factors that didn’t contribute to survival.

Exchanging DNA at a more rapid pace, gradually developed “strategies” that combined to create an overall survival strategy that sought to screen out destructive viral and bacterial agents. Over time, this process of reproduction became sexual reproduction, because genetic information could be passed on and controlled within a species by the male “informing” the egg of the female. The pattern remained generally the same, except now sperm acted as the informing agent, entering the egg, whereas before, a virus entered the cells of less organized bodies, and began replicating itself in order to survive. These replicating processes, over time, became a coordinated “survival strategy’ that worked within a species, with competition among sperm acting in similar fashion to a virus competing to enter a cell.

As you see in the quote from Wikipedia above, cloned systems gradually became extinct, while sexually producing systems maintained stability in their generations. In fact, it is that stability that gradually allowed for sexual selection over cloning.
It is this process in which the male, battling or competing for reproductive rights, is able to “inform” the female with the best genetic “information” as a result of that competition. Competition, instead of providing for evolution, actually guarded against evolutionary change, or at least guarded against randomized evolutionary change.
While we may look for a “mind” or “higher power’ as a regulator in this regard, the simple fact is that all the various DNA strands combining in a multi-celled organism would each select for information consistent with its own goals of survival. The process of life, and its complexity, does not require the maintenance and regulation of “God.”

Sexual reproduction emerged simply as a need for providing a defense against random genetic invasion. Scientists today know that the “germ” cells, those cells that are reproduced through transmission of sexual genetic traits, are not directly affected by viral infection. Germ cells are those cells that pass on information to your children. These, of course, are composed of egg and sperm cells. Another form of cells, however, are known as somatic cells, and the information in somatic cells are never passed on to germ cells. Mutations that occur in the somatic cell cannot be passed on to the germ cells.

This suggests that the germ cells, directly associated with genetic inheritance through sex, “screen” unnecessary changes from the environment.

Females, as the “receiver” of genetic information from men, naturally develop “screening” mechanisms that allow for specific selection of values and cultural traits that tend to forge security among cultures. Socially, this screening process among females has tended to control social arrangements.

From this evolves a selection of related traits in which we progress from religion as a means of securing our collective selves against death, to governments that secure us collectively against threats on earth, and to greater protection of ourselves as members of the group.

Just as rapid exchange of viruses and bacteria was gradually isolated into an immune system over time, so did the social process of animals become locked into protective strategies based on sexual reproduction, such as mating rituals among different species, even species that show very little difference visually to the human eye, which will develop very specific “signals” by which a species selects a proper mate. This allowed each species to adapt strictly to its environment, and to develop resistant genes to external change.

Humans, of course, began to alter this strict behavior when they began traveling extensively and encountering diseases which resulted from viruses and bacteria in foreign climates. In time, rites of passage began to develop, after the models of ritual mating behavior, generally that included fire, as it was discovered fire destroyed the ‘demons” that made the people sick. Food that was cooked with fire destroyed microbes that were harmful, which allowed for a less responsive immune system over time, and ritual behaviors developed that protected groups of humans over time.

What becomes more and more apparent over time, is that all of these basic drives result from the immune system. Sexual reproduction, geared to ritual mating protections, rites of passage, and even religion, over time, served to “immunize” us to the final confrontation of our own death. In many cases, this form of “immunizing” actually was a kind of “numbing” from those aspects of life that were too shocking to face constantly. Religion gradually allowed us to think that the trials and tribulations of this life are nothing compared to what is waiting for us “on the other side.”

Over time, and with exposure to many different religions, it became increasingly complicated to select one that allowed us to ritualize our behaviors and avoid the stress and “overchoice” that culture and technology gradually imposed. Men who weren’t easily convinced by religion needed government, and government began to replace the need of security, the “numbing” immunity that religion could no longer provide.

Marshall McLuhan, the “media guru”, pointed out that the communications medium, whatever it may be, alphabetic text, printing press, radio, TV , etc, is a form of “numbing” of those parts of us that are directly affected by the medium, similar to local anesthesia. The more easily we communicate common feelings and assumptions among ourselves, the more we are “numbed” to the differences that exist among us. Shared “meanings” communicated within our groups, reduced stress within the group by reducing the choices that would have been imposed on us as individuals.

Processes by which early groups formed alliances was also a form of “numbing” by combining social/sexual relations within the tribe, further restricting the genetic interference that would alter collective security. from mating rituals among animals, we developed rites of passage for puberty aged children.

From this, we gradually found ways of “numbing’ our self identity into false-family relations, such as “children of God”, “brotherhood of man”, terms which suggested genetic relations, but were merely conceptions representing such extensions of self. As such, we began looking for more abstract ways of combining collective “immunity” to the point, as Slater writes, that we discovered the “machine-like response”, organizing ourselves in such a way when faced with threat that sacrifice of individuals for the “greater good” allowed us to defeat those cultures less prepared in such mechanical fashion.

In this instance, natural selection became biased toward mechanical processes of organization that led to empires with god-kings and processes of organization that denied individual freedom of choice.

It may be that our deepest dilemmas today are between the immunity of the individual “self” and the collective “self” acting to preserve the “greatest good”. I believe that has always been the underlying argument in civilizations, tracing our decision-making processes to extensions of our immune system. This would also fit with Bruce Lipton’s “Biology of Belief”, and the emergent discoveries in epigenetics.

Government “immunizes’ us against the threat of growing old and having no means of survival, and this can also turn into a war-like “civilizing” influence over other nations, as we see in the US today, with invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

The more that individuals are empowered by communications media, however, the greater the threat of revolt against the evolutionary trends toward centralization. Each person becomes a “whole” rather than a mere “cell” in the body, or “cog in the machine”. This empowerment of individuals actually “re-sensitizes” us to events on a more personal level.

As such, we look for ways to “immunize’ our self against the swallowing up of collectivist ideologies. “Terrorism” is merely the war of evolving communications technology. Each individual begins to exercise power that s/he could only dream of at one time, and could only act collectively to achieve. We are more and more empowered to act as individuals, and this will be the central focus of emergent systems.

This empowerment of the individual against both church and state, however, forces us to develop new relations that transcend geographical isolation, and even local communities. Internet transactions allow us to participate “piecemeal” in many different groups, even as many different persons. The individual of the past becomes a complex set of relationships, and can even pretend to be of the opposite sex, pose as a much younger or older person, and is less and less restricted to the necessary identity imposed by both church and state.

From the biological system that gradually centralized us as living bodies over time, telecommunications now permits us to ‘de-centralize” our very personalities in ways that we never before imagined, and whether you are atheist or religious, “God” will undergo many new definitions.

I recently saw a show on PBS titled “Prohibition”. I’ve always had some interest in this era of history, with the crime and violence resulting from the attempt of the people to do “good”. What I did not know was that Prohibitionists helped usher in the Sixteenth Amendment, allowing the federal government to directly tax people, and avoid tax dependence on alcohol sales. I also did not realize that Prohibitionists encouraged hatred of Germans in WW1 so that German breweries such as Pabst and Schlitz could be demonized as evil on two fronts, being part of the German enemy, and producing alcohol that weakened the resolve and courage of “true” Americans.

If there is such a thing as ‘the purity trap” and societies behave in such a way as to suggest there is, then why do we focus on a system of laws and rules that are impossible to keep, venerate them, offer praise and sacrifice to them, and then regularly violate them?

Human society appears to live in contradiction to itself.

Western religion, mainly Christianity and Judaism, has focused on that very fact, the inability to live by the very standards we set as “absolute” or “perfect”, and then we declare it as a necessity to be “forgiven” so that we can avoid the eternal punishment that comes from trying to do what we cannot do in the first place!

This looks like a game where the dice are loaded, the dealer has stacked the deck, and there is no way to win but to surrender to the inevitable. Why make the rules at all if we know we can’t live up to them?

The main reason I see in terms of evolutionary significance, is that we need to know that there are basic standards that apply, and we must be aware that we aren’t perfect in the obedience to those standards. Why is this useful from an evolutionary perspective?

Because we have the ability, by looking at the desired standards, to know whether we are maintaining those standards both as individuals and as a group. This is basically why we have the Ten Commandments as a venerated set of rules, and why we originally held the US Constitution as the venerated set of rules by which individuals could remain free.

In an evolutionary sense, therefore, we have a way of looking at ourselves while not being dependent on how others view us. This, very idea, in itself, creates detachment from the group, because once we begin actually looking at specific standards, we have the ability to decide for ourselves, how those standards apply to us personally. Instead of following basic patterns of imitations provided by evolution in the form of “mirror neurons”, we can look at a detached code of conduct apart from those who seek to control us by their own standards. There is instantly a new, defineable reality apart from simply copying others.

If, for example, the law says ‘thou shalt not kill’, and I have killed no one, I do not need anyone else to judge whether or not I have killed anyone. In each of the Ten Commandments, whether they come from a supernatural entity or not, these laws give us the right and the power to say “prove I did this”. That is, we can maintain innocence by forcing others to demonstrate publicly that we have done anyone harm.

Whatever the law, or however strict it may be, once it becomes a law for all to see and understand, then all are responsible to see that it is upheld in the strictest possible form. In this sense, there are a few of the Ten Commandments that we can declare we have not violated in some sense. Most of us do not steal, most do not kill, most do not bear false witness or lie, most try to honor our parents, etc. As for the first two commandments, this may get a bit tricky, since in trying to define God in some human form, we tend to violate the second commandment.

As a result, we get caught in the “purity trap”, by which we try to perfectly identify ourselves with God, and see ourselves collectively as a group, being the agents of God. We know what happens when groups of people see themselves as agents of God. The Spanish Inquisition would be one example. The Roman Catholic Church would be an example of itself, along with the protestant churches that literally killed neighbors in the search for perfect obedience to God.

Prohibition, like many laws being passed now, are not based on actions in which any citizen can bring charges, but on acts in which no one is harmed, yet an individual can be punished by the state itself, acting as accuser and prosecutor.

Prohibition is the first example. Should any person be punished for simply taking a drink,(or taking a drug) even if he or she has harmed no one? Can the state itself act as witness, prosecutor, and judge of such an offense?

The original understanding from the biblical perspective is that everybody “sins”, everybody breaks the law in some way, so we should not rush to condemn the actions of another, especially when the other has done no harm to us. That is known as the presumption of innocence, and corresponds to Isaiah 54:17, and Isaiah 50:8.

That is, if the group begins to believe it acts collectively in the interests of “God”, then the group itself has chosen representatives to be a witness, prosecutor, and a judge. But Isaiah 50:8 specifically declares that the accused is allowed to challenge the accuser, under protection of God. This would mean that the state, as accuser, is acting as both protector and accuser, with its own interest being the guide in any decision. This means that the state has gone beyond the power to respect one’s right to believe in God, and has also declared itself AS God, on behalf of the people.

The people, seeking to protect society from itself, now sees itself as the humble servants of God, doing “right” for the betterment of society. As Eric Hoffer points out in “The True Believer”:

“The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness. who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven…he who is not of his faith is evil: he who will not listen shall perish”.

This is where the “purity trap” absolves us of individual responsibility. We can secretly support it, while publicly saying, “What can I do? It’s the will of the people.”

I recently had a judge tell me this when I challenged the seat belt law, on clearly stated principles decided by the Supreme Court. In the interest of protection, he told me, “Your Constitutional rights now take second place to the compelling interest of the state”. He further explained to me that he “had no choice” but to decide as the legislature and higher courts told him. Apparently he had never read Jeremiah 5:26-31. Nor had he read Isaiah 29:21.

It is also apparent that the officer who gave me the ticket had not read Exodus 23:1-2. By the creation of laws, by acting as prosecutor, witness, and judge, the laws themselves are violated! They are violated because they are there for us to know, understand, and apply in our own interest. This is what the Pharisees in Jesus’ day did, and why he accused them of “shutting up the Kingdom of God to men” in Matthew 23:13.

When the state itself becomes both witness and prosecutor, the accused has no right to challenge the accuser, since he is held accountable ONLY to the state. As Hoffer explains:

“Even when men league themselves mightily together to promote tolerance and peace on earth, they are likely to be violently intolerable toward those not of a like mind….When we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage, but are also rid of personal responsibility…The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.”

The great evolutionary step of law was that every person, man or woman, can claim equality before the law, and have the right to face his or her accusers, and challenge them to prove the validity of their accusations.
Anyone who tells you that the law is to be controlled collectively for your own good, that you have no right to think and act in your own interests as long as you harm no other, is a liar.

This was sent by a friend. I tend to agree that the Euro will crash and Armstrong’s dream of meat-hook wielding Nazi’s coming to America will be dashed!

My good friend Ralph inspired this blog by sending me a link to an article entitled
“The Covert Agenda Behind the Occupy Wall Street Protests.”

What caught my attention (besides the main point of this article) was a video by Garret Lo Porto entitled “The Wayseer Manifesto.” You may have seen this video on YouTube recently. After this upbeat and empowering video, one may feel inspired to feel “special” about themselves (a common tactics of cults). Lo Porto’s video then ends without offering a viable solution to your “new empowerment.” Why? One must look as to the motivation of the author.

The key to understanding this video is the knowledge you have already gained by your involvement with Herbie’s religious cult, the Worldwide Church of God.  So the next question is, who is Garret LoPorto, the author of the video below?

This man is a psychologist. In the article I linked to above, he is quoted as saying  “If you want people to believe in your brand, (and share that belief with others), your brand must be evolved into a cult brand. If you want buzz; if you want viral marketing; if you want sky-high conversion rates and you want customers to not just be customers, but total converts, then you’ve come to the right consulting firm.”

Here is the video, “The Wayseer Manifesto.”

So did you spot the cult tactics?

Below are two very good videos that refute  LoPorto’s video.

As you can see, cult tactics are not only used by religious charlatans, but marketing firms who replace your current ideology with a brand new one! Its called “The Haircut.”

Do people do evil if their environment dictates to them to do so, and if so, for what reason?

Conformity to group ethics can cause some to change their behavior into something other than who they really are. In this experiment, it is shown how humans can inflict severe levels of pain to a complete stranger. Even if they know it can cause permanent harm or death.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three.
Pay attention to the answers given by these “people” who thought they were inflicting harmful or deadly electric shocks to a stranger. At point 1:38 we have someone who has personal ethics outside the “group think” as to obedience to perceived authority.

This projection towards personal violence is in all of us. The question is, in a mind control cult, where does the leader of the group draw the line? And more forth, at what point does personal responsibility begin?

After World War II, the German public was forced to view the onslaught of destruction that their leaders wreaked upon the innocent. The public was compelled to view the corpses of the Jews, Russians and other enemy combatants. What was the justification of the German people in allowing this holocaust to take place? Just where were these people when it came to combating this force of evil that ruled over them?

For an example of what I speak of, try this:

In conclusion, people will not only allow evil to exist, they will support it.
In the Armstrong empire we were taught that the world was evil. In reality, we were the world. People do evil in or out of religion. Our indifferent behavior and holier than thou attitudes came from the pulpit just like genocide came forth from the Nazis.

We are no different if we are unaware of the lessons of the past!

Found this online today. Fascinating!
It brings into question the practice of abortion.

“The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go– the complexity of these, the mathematical models of how these things are indeed done are beyond human comprehension. Even though I’m a mathematician, I look at this with a marvel of how did these instruction sets not make mistakes as they build what is us. It’s a mystery, its magic, its divinity.”
-Alexander Tsiaras

Your thoughts?

A small Kentucky church finds itself at the epicenter of a battle over racism and the gospel. Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, a small, 40-person congregation located in Pike County, Kentucky, is catching widespread grief over its recent decision to target interracial couples. The church has decided to forbid these couples from partaking in worship activities and will not allow them to become members. -The Blaze.

Armstrong mentality in a non cog cult. Who would have thought!

I know, I know!

The last time in the 1970s we sort of missed the Beast of Revelation!

We were so sure it was Joseph Hayden… no, that’s not right… it was like a name of a composer… was it? was it? Yes! Herr Strauss!

Herr Strauss was a prominent political figure somewhere in Germany and he had all — I mean ALL — of the appearances of the qualifications of being the prime candidate of the Beast Power! He even visited our college campus, although we had to do the hypocritical thing of hiding all our literature that called him the Beast of Revelation. What a public relations nightmare if he ever found out. We figured, though, that with a little PR, we could con him into saving our little insignificant but mostly beautiful campus through The Great Tribulation and would preserve it so that it would be intact when we reversed everything, took over the world and became the Real Beast Power — under Jesus Christ, of course.

How could we have been so very wrong?!?!!!

No.

It isn’t possible!

I don’t believe it!

Anyway, we have the one and only prime — and when I say prime, I mean truly prime hunk of meat on the hoof, so to speak — candidate to carry out Satan’s Plan of Domination to take over the world, sort of like the Brain in Pinky and the Brain!

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the Beast of Revelation!

This time for sure.

We know this because he described himself as “something of a political animal”.

You see!

A Beast for sure. He’s selected himself by his own words!

We now know for sure! We are absolute on our confidence we have found the Beast Power of Revelation, ready to ride the Scarlet Woman bareback!!! He is here! He is prepared! He’s our man!

Just don’t go and die on us, like the last one we were sure of did.

By Armstrong Plagiarism Research

Did Herbert Armstrong steal the phrase “empirical self” and the concept of the empirical self?  The term is used in psychology and predates Armstrong.  His Autobiography says he studied psychology, so he could have picked it up from psychology.  The basic concept, as used by the famous psychologist William James, is very similar to the way Armstrong used it.

The WCG’s old Bible Correspondence Course describes the term “empirical self” as “a little empire”, or larger self, extending beyond the self, out to include things we own or identify with.  The concept of a larger self is also used in psychology, but the word “empirical” is a scientific term that does not refer to an empire at all.  Armstrong and his WCG seem to have confused the term “empirical” with “imperial”. Only the latter term is related to empire.  The correct meaning of the term “empirical” makes sense in the science of psychology but doesn’t really make sense in theology.

It seems that Armstrong made a mistake which helps us detect his (apparent) plagiarism. If Armstrong had used the word that actually describes what he was trying to say, i.e. the self as a little empire, the “imperial self”, it would be harder to trace his use of the term back to the science of psychology.  In that case we could suppose that he came up with the term independently.  But since he apparently thought “empirical” was related to “empire”, an easy mistake to make, we can see that he likely plagiarized the concept of the empirical self from psychology.

Furthermore, when discussing the empirical self, Armstrong used the expression “to coin a phrase” as if he is originated the term himself.

If he only plagiarized this one thing it might not be a major issue.  But there is evidence that he took many other doctrines, even key doctrines, from other churches even though he always said he did not get his doctrines from men.  In some cases the copying was nearly word-for-word.  This subject (the empirical self and other plagiarisms) is examined in detail (the evidence, the arguments, and the repercussions) on the Armstrong Plagiarism Research site, which gathers together information on the question of Armstrong’s plagiarism from various sources and perspectives.

The Painful Truth asks if any of you can identify who the minister was in the Bangor, ME congregation in New Hampshire, in late 1960′s – early 70′s.
Please contact the Painful Truth if you have information that I can pass on.

Hi there,
I came across your website, the painful truth, after emailing to a similar site earlier today.  I am a former member of the WWCG.  When I was born (1975) my parents had been in the church for several years and I stopped attending in 1994 a year after I left home for college.  We were members of the Bangor, ME congregation and prior to my birth my parents attended a congregation in New Hampshire.  In any event, I write because I am looking for information – any information you or any of your readers can help with.  It has recently come to my attention that in or around the late-60s, early-70s, my father and uncle as well as others were sexually abused by a minister I only know as Mr. Cheatham.  I am not even sure that is the correct spelling of his name.  Apparently he sexually abused many children and did other bad things (being vague because it’s hard to get people to talk about it).  Anyway, my father and uncle both have significant mental health issues consistent with child abuse and now I understand why they are so messed up.  I am trying to come to terms with this, and to help my family members who were abused.  I am sure at this point that the statute of limitations has run out, and I have no idea if this guy is even still alive.  But I’d like to find out who he is/was – his identity, and possibly connect with any of his other victims.

I am happy to have my post published (anonymously please!) on your site if appropriate.  Also happy to simply receive a reply with any info or leads you may have.  Thank you for hosting your website.  It has been really eye-opening for me all these years later to come across it and see the faces of these guys who robbed me of my childhood, and my dad of his sanity.

“Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus” by spoken-word artist Jefferson Bethke has received more than 10.2 million YouTube views as of Saturday night since it was posted just four days ago, eliciting more than 100,000 YouTube comments and plenty of debate elsewhere on the Internet.

From his YouTube page we read: “In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it‘s core Jesus’ gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can’t do your own list of rules and feel “not good enough” for God. With Jesus though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don’t represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God!”

Your thoughts?

I don’t usually post on events or opinions outside the realm of Armstrong-ism, but I will make an exception today.

Some of the critics of this proposed law include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, AOL and Zynga.

Those in support of censorship include television networks, music publishers, movie industry bodies, book publishers and manufacturers. Read more of what they had to say to the congress and why this is important to the freedom of all Americans here.

Silence.co had the following video available on their website, and points out as to the importance of this subject to all the people who wish to remain free. Posted below.

“Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a tacit admission during a U.S. Foreign Policy Priorities committee meeting yesterday, arguing that the State Department needs more money because the US military-industrial complex is “losing the information war” to the likes of Russia Today and Al Jazeera due to the US corporate media having completely abandoned “real news”.”

America losing the propaganda war. A good thing no doubt!

by Mary Ellen Humphrey

The Painful Truth will post on this blog, excerpts of this book for your review. The complete book will follow shortly. This novel is based on her WCG experiences.  There is a little ‘generic’ flavoring to it to include other similar groups. Reading this really strikes at the heart, to understand what it was like as a kid growing up in a cult!

Feel free to comment. The author, Mary Ellen Humphrey is more than willing to respond to your questions or comments.

Introduction
Time heals all things. So they say. Unfortunately
exploitation in the name of God occurs more often than
most realize. Don’t be so sure only the frail and weak fall
victim although that would certainly be bad enough. This
kind of scam can and does happen to all ages and to all
levels of education. It knows no limits and has no
boundaries.
Such experiences cut your soul like broken glass.
And the sad result—the most devastating loss is not
one’s possessions, not one’s dignity. All those may be
restored.
It’s the loss of one’s faith.

Chapter 1
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1
What is faith? Where does it come from? How do
you find it? How do you know if you truly have it?
Faith, Kathleen and Rachel were young, hopeful, and
filled with anticipation. Their whole lives lay ahead, full of
promise. They were three different young women drawn
together by each one’s individual desire to find a perfect
future. They were certain that their lives were going to be
better than their own family experiences. They believed
it with all their heart. They had faith.
It all began in the spring of 1970…..in Montpelier,
Vermont…
Faith rounded the corner from her home heading
towards the high school from which she would soon
graduate. She stopped at the enclosed bus stop and put
her book bag down on the bench. She glanced around
nervously, and then rolled her skirt waistband up, bringing
her skirt length from below her knees to a length a few
inches above them. The girls at school were wearing
miniskirts and hot pants, pushing the limits of the school
dress code and testing the administration. Yesterday, her
friend Alice was sent home to change after careful
examination and measurements by the principal’s
secretary. Alice wore her notoriety like a badge of honor,
but Faith knew better. If she were ever sent home for
improper dress, it would just kill her parents.

When I’m on my own I am going to buy myself nice storemade
clothes and stop looking like a freak, Faith promised
herself.
From her school bag she pulled out a small travel
case. Inside she kept her makeup. Her mother had
almost found it last week when she started rummaging in
the bag looking for Faith’s lunch container. Faith knew her
mother would have punished her severely if she found the
makeup. It was forbidden for women to wear any makeup
in God’s True Church. The worst punishment would be
her parent’s disappointment, and that was Faith’s greatest
fear. She didn’t want to let them down. But they didn’t have to go
to school, and if they did, she knew they’d understand why she broke
the rules just a little.
She applied some pink lipstick, blue eye shadow and
mascara. She untied the tidy black velvet bow holding her
hair in a ponytail and let her straight strawberry blond hair
flow along her shoulders.
I’m not as strong as the other church girls are, Faith
thought. They think I’m strong. They assume I am because
Mom and Dad are so deeply converted. But I’m not.
“Hey, beautiful!”
“Billy! I didn’t see you. How long have you been
watching me?”
The young man smiled. “I just got here. You don’t
need that stuff. You are gorgeous just as you are!” He
stepped closer and closed his arms firmly around her. She
closed her eyes and smiled. He kissed her affectionately
on her cheek.
Faith blushed and stood back, but he held her hands.
“You are beautiful,” he said. “Look at your skin. It’s
flawless. And you have the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
He stroked her long blond hair. “I love you, Faith.”
“Billy, stop. You know we shouldn’t…” Faith pulled
away reluctantly.

“Come on,” Billy said. “We’re going to be late for
class.”
Alice nudged Faith who was reaching into her locker.
“Hey girl. I saw you walk in with Billy. You two going
together?”
“No. Nothing like that,” Faith said. “We’re just
friends.”
“Well, I think it’s cute. You make the perfect couple.”
Alice scrutinized Faith’s outfit with a curved eyebrow, but
she didn’t make any comments. “Some of us are going to
sneak into the theater Saturday night to see that new
movie, Mash. You want to come?”
“Um, I can’t.”
“Oh, you’re such a square, Faith. I thought the
preacher’s daughter was the one who always got into the
most trouble. Don’t you ever have any fun?”
“My Dad isn’t a preacher…” Faith started to explain.
“Hey, I ‘m just razzing you. Don’t sweat it.”
Faith tried to explain. “We’re going to New
Hampshire this weekend. I won’t be around.”
“That’s cool. What’s going on in New Hampshire?”
Faith regretted mentioning it. She didn’t want to tell
her friend she went to New Hampshire every weekend for
church services. “We’re visiting family,” she said.
“Groovy. Hey, I’ll see you at lunch. Some of us are
eating out on the track field. It’s so nice, you know spring
fever—see you there.” Alice hurried down the hall.
“Groovy,” Faith said to herself. She smiled as she
remembered Billy. “Yeah, I am feeling kinda groovy.” She
headed towards her class.
Graduation was only a few weeks away. Classes were
mostly a formality for the seniors. Faith’s mind wandered
as she sat through English, and math, and study hall. She
hurried when the lunch bell rang and met up with her

friends at the track field. Alice was smiling and talking with
several other girls who moved over on the bench to make
room for Faith. One of them turned on a small transistor
radio and tuned in to a music station.
“Alice says you and Billy are going together,” one of
the girls said.
Faith glanced at Alice who had a mischievous look in
her eye. Faith smiled. “Well, not exactly going together.”
“What then?”
“We’re friends.”
“Oh, we believe that. I saw how he looked at you.
He’s whipped,” Alice said.
Faith smiled. “Oh, can you turn up the radio. I love
that song.”
The radio belted out a new release from the Poppy
Family. Faith had heard the song a few times when she
played her radio in her room at night while she studied.
Susan Jack’s angelic voice sang out, “which way you going,
Billy. Can I go too?” There wasn’t much to the song,
mostly a repeat of the chorus, but it touched Faith.
“Look, she’s moonstruck!” one of the girls said. They
all giggled. Faith giggled too, but deep down the song’s
words meant something she knew her friends could never
understand.
Time dragged that afternoon as Faith sat through two
more classes—history and sociology. All the real work
was done, but the teachers tried to keep the students
interested. Faith listened as her teacher talked about
current affairs. President Nixon had reinstated the draft.
Faith worried about Billy. Would he have to go to
Vietnam? Would any of their fellow students end up
there? The school had a memorial wall in the entrance
way with the names of former students who’d gone to
Vietnam, those who served, those who’d been injured, and
those who never returned. She recognized some of the
names, but she hadn’t known any of them personally.

Faith passed it every day without much thought, but
now, she worried. Her younger brother was only 16, but
what if the war continued for several more years. He
would have to be a conscientious objector. It was
required by God’s True Church. But Billy didn’t belong to
the church. He’d have to go. She listened intently as the
teacher explained how the draft lottery worked, how each
male had to register for the draft when he turned 18, and
how his birth date would determine his standing regarding
the draft.
Faith’s family didn’t watch television. They didn’t even
own a set. But she could listen to the news on her radio,
and she could read the newspapers. She had to know
Billy’s fate, even if they weren’t destined to be together.
Faith glanced up at the clock in the classroom. School
would be out in a few moments. It would soon be time to
return to her proper self. She thought it odd how she was
two different people, and how she could almost forget her
religious obligations when she was at school. But now she
must transition back to the true Faith, the girl she was
supposed to be.
She said good-bye to her friends and headed down the
street towards
her home. I wonder if I really fool any of them, she
thought as she walked along. Maybe they are just being
polite. Suddenly, Faith felt a pang of anger. What if they feel
sorry for me, she thought. Her face flushed with
humiliation. Why can’t I just be a normal kid?
Billy ran up behind her. “Faith, wait up,” he called.
She stopped and turned around. She smiled. “Can I walk
you home?” he asked.
She paused and his expression turned to concern.
She could see his insecurity about their friendship. She
knew she shouldn’t lead him on. There was no future in

their relationship. But still she reached towards him and
took his hand. He smiled.
“Sure. Just to the corner, okay? My folks wouldn’t,
uh, well, just to the corner, okay?” Her face was hot and
she knew her pale white skin was now red with
embarrassment. How could she explain this to Billy or any
of her friends at school? They would never understand.
“It’s okay, Faith,” Billy said, squeezing her hand
reassuringly. “My folks are old-fashioned, too.”
“Really?” she said, relieved.
“I know what it’s like,” he said.
“I doubt that,” Faith answered, “but I’d love for you to
walk with me.”
They walked while holding hands. Faith loved this
new feeling—this friendship feeling was like none she’d
ever experienced. Often she would date older men in the
church, but none of them ever made her feel this way or
this happy. “Do you know what you are doing after
graduation?” Billy asked.
“I’m not sure,” Faith answered carefully. “College
probably. My parents want me to go to the school they
both attended in California.” She didn’t tell Billy that it
was a religious college run by God’s True Church,
designed to prepare young people for roles in the ministry.
Males were to become ministers. Females were to
become help-mates and proper minister’s wives.
“Why so far away?” he asked somberly.
“Well, I’m not sure yet that I’m going,” Faith
answered. “It’s a pretty choosy college. Not everyone
gets in, and they don’t decide until July.”
“Do you want to go there?”
“It’s an honor if I’m chosen. And my folks will be very
pleased.” Faith answered.
“You didn’t answer my question. Do YOU want to
go?”

Faith walked silently. She hadn’t allowed herself to
consider this question. She should want to go. Everyone
in the church wanted to be chosen to go. But it felt like
an extension of the stifling conditions she’d grown up in—
no freedom, no opportunity to truly be herself.
Billy stopped and turned towards her, looking intently
into her eyes. “I wish you wouldn’t go so far away,” he
said. “Tell me you are looking at closer schools so I can
have some hope.”
Faith sighed. Other schools were out of the question.
Her only other option was marriage to a church member,
a marriage chosen by the ministry. They arrived at the bus
stop and stepped inside.
Billy leaned in and whispered, “You know I’m crazy
about you.”
She leaned in closer. “I like you, too. But we can’t
get involved. I told you already—that isn’t possible.” She
bit her quivering lip.
“I guess I just don’t believe that,” he said. “And I
don’t give up that easy.” He kissed her. She didn’t stop
him. There was some privacy within the bus stop
enclosure. She closed her eyes. Her heart raced. She felt
a rush of emotions she’d never felt before. This is wrong!
Her inner voice warned. A good Christian girl doesn’t do this!
“Stop,” she whispered. He kissed her again, his lips
hot with passion pressing on to her lips, and she held him
tightly. This is supposed to be saved for my future husband.
Disloyalty! Wickedness! Her mind scolded her. A virtuous
woman wouldn’t do this! She didn’t want to hear it. All the
endless sermons and warnings couldn’t stop the passion of
the moment. She didn’t allow herself to think, only to feel,
and it felt wonderful.
When Billy groaned and kissed her harder, she pushed
his hands away from her body. “No, I can’t. I have to go
home now.”
Billy stood up. “Are you sure?”

She nodded weakly. “Please, just go, Billy. I can’t do
this.”
“It’s okay, Faith. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You’re not angry?”
“I’d never be angry with you.” He bent over and lifted
her face to look directly into her eyes. “I love you Faith,
and I’ll wait for you as long as it takes.” He lovingly tapped
the tip of her nose and smiled. Then he stood up and
walked away.
Faith watched him walk away. A tear rolled down her
cheek. Then she unrolled her skirt and wiped off her
makeup with a moist towelette. She combed her hair back
into a discreet bow with the black velvet ribbon, and
headed home. As she rounded the corner to her house,
she returned to the proper religious girl she was supposed
to be.

In Dover, New Hampshire…
Kathleen’s grandmother, Paddy, came into the living
room and turned on the television real loud. The old lady
was hard of hearing especially when her ears were numb
from alcohol. Paddy was a mean drunk. Not a sweet old
lady, not a happy drunk, just plain mean. She would
especially pick on Kathleen. “Why aren’t you in school
where you ought to be?” Paddy demanded. “Why are you
dressed like a tramp? Don’t you know that girls who
dress like that are asking for it?” Kathleen couldn’t stand
it. She took her book and moved into the kitchen.
Never did Paddy offer a kind word and Kathleen knew
it was best to avoid her when she was in one of her
moods. Besides, her book was getting to the good part.
So she headed for the kitchen where her mother was
preparing dinner.

“Paddy is really nasty, Mom,” Kathleen said as she
slumped down into a chair.
“Stay away from her,” her mother said.
“It’s not my fault she’s drunk, Mom. Geez, can’t you
do something.”
“Watch your tone, young lady. And we don’t cuss in
this house.”
“Geez isn’t cussing, Mom.”
“It’s a substitute for Jesus, which is just as bad. Don’t
you kid yourself.”
“Why are you mad at me? I didn’t do anything.”
“Kathleen, you just sit around all day and complain.
You should go back to school and get your diploma.”
“That’s not fair. You’re turning this around to make
me the bad guy. Paddy is the drunk and you don’t do
anything. You never do anything. Dad gets drunk and you
tell us all to stay out of his way. Geez, Mom, this is my
home, too!”
Her mother sighed. “Kathleen, you know perfectly
well, that as a Christian woman, I cannot disrespect my
husband even though he’s not converted. And unlike you, I
obey God’s commandments and respect my elders,
including your father and your grandmother.”
“Mom, come on. Dad’s a drunk. He’s a bum. They’re
both drunks and all you do is defend them.”
“I think you should pray about this,” her mother
suggested with a frown.
“They’re alcoholics, Mom. Are you blind?”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say, Kathleen.” Her
mother turned back around to the counter and stirred the
pot vigorously. “I don’t want to hear any more talk like
that. You’re supposed to respect your parents.”
“Me? Why is it my fault, Mom? I don’t drink
myself into oblivion. I don’t get nasty and snarl at people.
Why do you put this on me?”

“Kathleen, you need to get on your knees and ask
God to forgive your bad attitude!”
Kathleen bristled. “I’m going to read in my room
where I can find some peace and quiet,” she said.
Kathleen wondered what had gone wrong with her
plans. When she dropped out of school, she envisioned
her days filled with reading and painting. Home was not
the escape she’d anticipated. Paddy was retired and when
her social security check arrived, she’d stock up on vodka
and whiskey.
Before Kathleen quit school, she’d seen Paddy late in
the day when she was beyond the mean stage, usually
sleeping on the couch with the television blaring. Now
since Kathleen was the handiest person to pick on, she
received the brunt of her meanness.
Kathleen hadn’t counted on that. She dreamed of
becoming a famous artist and showing her work in New
York and Boston art galleries. Her work would be
renowned and valuable. Then she’d be valuable.
A few hours later, Linda came to Kathleen’s door.
“You all right?”
“Just fine,” Kathleen answered.
“Mom said I should check on you. Dinner’s almost
ready.”
“I’m not hungry,” Kathleen said as she turned the page
of the novel she was reading.
“Fine.” Linda said and left.
“Fine,” Kathleen parroted. “That’s just fine.”
Kathleen put her book down. It wasn’t nearly as
interesting as she’d tried to believe. In fact, she hardly
remembered the plot anymore. Linda was the smart one.
She was the one everyone liked and praised. Paddy never
said a bad word about Linda. Look at her, she’s just so
together. She gets all A’s at school. She is the field hockey
captain. She’s the most popular girl in school. She does
everything perfectly and when she graduated valedictorian last

year, it was a super big deal, Kathleen thought. The
program from the ceremony was still pinned to the
refrigerator. Now Linda was stellar in a local college.
Kathleen looked at herself in the mirror. She was tall
and thin, but plain. Linda was so pretty. Kathleen wore
tattered jeans and t-shirts. Linda wore miniskirts and
stylish bell bottoms. Kathleen was a klutz and couldn’t
sing a tune and had no rhythm. Linda played the piano and
danced expertly—she’d been the hit in the drama club and
won a state prize for her acting role.
Kathleen didn’t like being the center of attention. She
preferred solitude, reading a book, or painting to hanging
out with dopey friends who constantly put her down or
compared her to Linda. They are all right, Kathleen
thought. Linda is smart and pretty and wonderful. I admire
her too, but I can never be like her.
Kathleen went over to her easel and looked at the
picture she’d been painting earlier. She took it down and
tossed it in the corner with several other half-finished
canvasses. I can’t live like this, she thought. I’m going
nowhere. My life is going nowhere. I have to get out of here!
In Standish, Maine…
Rachel adjusted the volume on the car radio. She
shivered and wiped the water from her face on her sleeve,
but her sleeve was so wet it only smudged the water
around. Outside the dark and heavy rain pounded against
the car roof. She was drenched from her run through the
rain to escape the hell inside her house.
Why did she come back? Why couldn’t she leave us
alone? We were fine. We were happy. Why did she have to
come back!
Rachel pulled out a tissue from her pocket and wiped
her nose. The voice on the radio boomed through the

darkness offering answers. She loved to listen to this
program—”The Wonderful World That’s Coming Soon”.
Even the title offered hope. Russell W. Sherburne offered
the answers to life’s difficult questions. He promised a
future filled with peace and happiness. Tonight he talked
about a cyclone tidal wave in Somalia that killed over
20,000 people. It was the fulfillment of end-time
prophecies where the world would be filled with wars and
rumors of wars, with pestilence and disease, and natural
catastrophes like earthquakes and tidal waves. For those
who were paying attention, all the clues are there—we are
nearing the end times. But Russell offered hope—because
all this was leading to the wonderful world tomorrow
when the Messiah would return to rule for a thousand
years of peace. He quoted Biblical passages and offered a
free Bible correspondence course. He spoke with
confidence and authority. She always felt better after
listening to the program. Rachel switched on the interior
light and scribbled down the information so she could send
away for this course.
Two hours later, when Rachel went back inside, it was
quiet. The arguing had stopped. Everyone had gone to
bed. No one missed her. Her two brothers were hiding
in their rooms, just as they always did when the fighting
started.
Why couldn’t she be that smart she wondered?
Instead, she always seemed to be caught in the middle of
it. Tonight her father cried when her mother pointed to
Rachel and screamed, “You molested her! I have proof!”
Rachel was horrified to see her mother was holding
her diary. For as long as she could remember her diary
was her companion and confidant. She expressed her
most private thoughts and fears where no one could judge,
criticize or question.
Now her mother had stolen it, violating her, and was
using it to falsely accuse her father of something terrible.

Yes, he had hugged her very tightly. She’d written that in
her diary. It was after one of those ugly arguments and
she knew that he couldn’t express his feelings in words.
He was trying to tell her that he loved her despite the evil
accusations of her mother to the contrary. Rachel knew
that he never hurt her. That he was sorry for her
suffering, that maybe he felt responsible for her pain and
wished he could make it all better. She knew her Dad
regretted marrying this woman, but he didn’t know how
to fix it now that there were three children.
Her mother was perverting this into some nasty,
mean, vindictive thing. Rachel knew her mother would
carry out her threat.
“He molested you!” her mother accused.
“That’s not true,” Rachel choked out, grabbing for her
diary. “That’s not what I wrote at all!” Rachel hated her
mother.
Her mother smirked, holding the diary away from
Rachel. “You can say anything you want, but when a judge
reads this, he’ll send your father to jail! I’ll see to it.”
The drawn look on her father’s face was too much for
Rachel. She grabbed the car keys next to the door and
ran out of the house through the heavy rain to the car.
Once again, she escaped into the promising world of this
radio program—The Wonderful World That’s Coming
Soon.
Now the kitchen was silent. Her diary sat on the
kitchen table. She picked it up feeling like a wounded
animal and crept quietly to her bedroom. She began to
read from a passage she’d written a year ago in 1969. “I
don’t see what the big deal is all about. So I turned 16
today. There’s nothing sweet about it. My life is still just
as miserable as it was yesterday. No one even noticed it
was my birthday. I’m glad. It would just be another
reason for Mom and Dad to fight. I can’t stand it anymore.
Why did she have to come back? It was so peaceful with

just Dad and my brother and me. The kids at school say
awful things about her, but I don’t listen. I don’t care what
they say. She’s my mother. No matter what she does, I
still love her. I can’t do anything else. I can’t hate her.
She’s my mother. But I want to hate her. I hate what she
does. She hurts so many people. I never want to be like
her. She constantly lies. I never want to be like her. If I
thought I was like her, I’d kill myself so I wouldn’t hurt the
people I love. I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt people
like she does. God, I pray I don’t turn out like her.”
Rachel sighed as she read her past words. She
wondered if her mother had read this section. She
doubted it would even faze her mother in the least if she
did read it.
Now, two months later, her mother had returned
again. She was even more vindictive this time. Rachel
knew what she wanted. She knew her mother was
determined to ruin everything. Her mother wouldn’t be
satisfied until Rachel left her Dad and went to live with
her. Why? Rachel could only guess at her mother’s
motives.
The next morning Rachel woke with the sun. Despite
her recurrent insomnia, Rachel always got up early. It
would be years before she understood the extent of the
trauma she and her brothers were experiencing. In many
ways, insomnia was her friend. It kept her from those
terrible nightmares.
She’d placed the diary on her bureau next to the
white zippered Bible her grandmother had given her for
her twelfth birthday. She cherished the Bible as much as
her diary. Her grandmother emphasized how special this
Bible was, and had it inscribed to Rachel. That’s why
Rachel felt so badly when she discovered it was missing.
“Where’s your white Bible?” her grandmother had
asked when visiting.

“There’s a little girl next door who took it,” Rachel
explained.
“How do you know she took your Bible?”
“Because she invited me to her room to show it to
me. I don’t understand, Gram. She tore out the inscribed
pages. But how could she think I wouldn’t recognize it?”
“What did you say to her?”
“I didn’t know what to say. Her bedroom is in the
attic. You can see daylight through beams in the walls. I
know they are poor. All that she has is a light bulb hanging
down on a wire in the center of her ceiling. We had to
climb an old ladder just to get to her room.”
Her grandmother put her arms around Rachel.
“Don’t say anything to that little girl. Let her keep the
Bible. I’ll get you another one.”
“But it won’t be the same,” Rachel protested.
“It’s not the White Bible that matters. It’s the love
inside the book. That’s what you need to remember. No
matter what happens, God loves you. He loves everyone,
even that little girl who took your Bible.”
Sure enough, the next time her grandmother visited,
she had an identical white zippered Bible. Rachel
treasured it. Her grandmother had told her no matter
what happened, God loved her. She could have faith in
the words in that Bible. She believed her grandmother.
She wasn’t a liar like her mother.
Rachel unzipped her white Bible and turned to I John
4, verse 8. “God is Love.” It was one of her favorite
passages. She knew God loved her. There was hope, just
like the man on the radio promised. All she had to do was
believe.
Rachel made scrambled eggs for breakfast for her two
brothers and herself. Her father left for work at six,
before anyone else was up. She woke her brothers and
set the table. Her younger brother had left the last time
to live with their mother. Her older brother and she had

stayed behind to live with their father. Even though he
was only fifteen, her younger brother had quit school. He
spent his days waiting on his mother and working around
the house. He had an emotional chip on his shoulder and
blamed everyone else for his mother’s unhappiness.
Rachel didn’t blame him for his misguided anger. She felt
sorry for him.
When Rachel went to her room to dress for school,
her mother came in, eying Rachel nervously. Her mother
picked up the diary. “You’re coming with me,” she said.
“No. I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying here with
Dad.” Rachel stood rigidly next to the bureau as if it
would give her some added strength. “I can make my own
decision about where to live. That’s what the judge said
when you got your divorce.”
“Not when he reads this,” her mother snarled. She
opened to a page and read, “Dad hugged me so tight it
frightened me.”
“It doesn’t say what you imply,” Rachel said shaking.
“Doesn’t matter. All I have to do is create a doubt.”
Her mother smirked triumphantly.
“But you know it isn’t true. How could you do that?”
Rachel’s mother gave her that familiar you-reallythink-
I-care look. It was the look she always had when she
was about to explode. “I am your mother! You have to
do what I tell you!”
“I’m not going with you,” Rachel whispered, cowering.
“Then I’m not going. I’ll stay right here. It’s only a
matter of time before your father goes back to the
hospital—maybe this time he won’t come home, especially
after he faces a charge of molestation in court.”
“You drove him to a nervous breakdown,” Rachel
said, her voice cracking. “You pushed him down the
stairs—I saw you do it!” Rachel started crying. She hated
that. She hated that her mother was winning. She hated
being so weak.

“So what?”
Rachel knew her mother’s threats were real. She
would make her father’s life hell. She’d literally drive him
crazy, until he cracked. She might even try to kill him like
she did before.
“When are you leaving?” Rachel asked in defeat.
“We’re leaving today. Pack your stuff. And your
brother’s too.”
“You mean I can’t even say good-bye to Dad?”
“Why would you want to do that?” Her mother
curled up her lips hatefully and Rachel knew it was over.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll like it. We’re going to that church you’re
always listening to on the radio. They meet in Manchester,
New Hampshire on Saturdays. It’ll be good for you.”
Rachel looked at her mother in disbelief. “Why
would you take us to that church? You don’t even believe
in it?”
Her mother smiled. “That’s how I can control you
kids.”
Before they left Rachel took her diary down to the
basement furnace. She opened the door and threw it
inside and watched as the flames consumed her old friend
and confidant. Her mother had taken yet another thing
away from her.
Now a year later, when Rachel came home from
school her heart sank. Her mother was moving yet again.
They had already moved five times. She barely knew the
kids at school and graduation was only a few weeks away.
Boxes were half-filled and littered the apartment. This
time, she had no intention of bringing Rachel along. “I
can’t wait until June to be rid of you!” Her mother spit the
hateful words at her when Rachel entered the living room.

End Chapter one. More Sunday.

by Mary Ellen Humphrey

Chapter 2
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in
me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his
neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6

Manchester, New Hampshire that following
Saturday…
Rachel couldn’t believe it. She was here. She was
actually here attending the services of the church she’d
listened to so many times on the radio. These were God’s
people. This was God’s true church. She couldn’t believe
it.
The Odd Fellows Hall was an old brick building on
Hanover Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. The
church met on the fourth floor in an old and
uncomfortably warm room. Services were not on Sunday,
but on Saturday, the true Sabbath according to scriptures,
as Rachel had learned in her Bible course.
As soon as they got to the top of the stairs, a large
man greeted them. He had a voice as big as his burly
body. “Welcome to the True Church of God!” he said,
grabbing their hands and shaking them vigorously. Her
mother had led the way and didn’t seem the slightest
25
taken back by this greeting but Rachel stood back a little.
She didn’t like physical contact, especially with strangers,
especially with strange large men.
Rachel noticed a table with a woman sitting behind it.
Her dark hair was pulled back into a tight bun and she had
a typewriter in front of her and was busy filling out some
forms. There were framed color photos and posters on
the table, and church literature, some of which she
recognized. In the photos was an elderly man posing with
dignified looking individuals. Rachel glanced at them and
realized that it was the man she’d heard on the radio.
These were photos of him preaching the good news to
world leaders, just as he’d claimed.
“My name is Jordan,” the greeter said. “How did you
find us?”
Her mother answered, “Mr. Critchett invited us.”
This satisfied Jordan who then asked, “And how did you
come to The Truth?”
Rachel wondered for only a moment who was this Mr.
Critchett since she had never heard of him. Then she
slipped quietly past as her mother chatted with this man.
She looked around the meeting room. The windows
were large and low to the floor. Someone had opened
one near the doorway and Rachel worried instantly that a
child might fall out. She looked around. No one was
paying any attention to the window and the small children
were close to their mothers.
Here she was in a place she’d only dreamed about
with people who shared her dream, people who cared
about the problems in the world and were actually doing
something about it to make a difference. She surveyed the
room of people, the men and boys were all dressed in
suits and the women dressed in their best clothes. Even
the little children were dressed up. Most were quiet and
hanging near their parents. The men had brief cases. The
women carried a Bible along with their handbags. Women
26
greeted one another with hugs and chatted in hushed
voices.
Two youngsters ran by her, pushing and hollering.
They were about six or seven, Rachel thought. Not so
well behaved as the other children, yet no one paid any
attention to them.
“Hello,” a feminine voice said from behind. “You’re
new here, aren’t you? My name is Faith.”
Rachel turned to the young woman, noting how pretty
she was, with her blonde hair neatly tied back with a black
velvet bow and her lovely shirtwaist flower-print dress.
“Hi, I’m Rachel. This is my first time here.”
“When did the minister invite you?” the girl inquired.
Rachel looked confused. “Invite me?”
“Well, you can’t attend services unless you’re invited.”
“Uh, my mother said we were invited by Mr.
Critchett. I don’t know when,” Rachel explained, feeling a
wave of unease.
Faith’s eyes sparkled as she looked over the
newcomer. Rachel wondered what she was thinking.
“Here, let me show you around,” Faith offered. “Come
on.”
Faith took Rachel over to her mother. “Mom, this is
Rachel. She’s new.”
Faith’s mother turned to Rachel and asked, “Where
are you from?”
“Standish, Maine,” Rachel said, smiling. Faith’s
mother was about the same age as her own mother; she
guessed and wondered what kind of relationship the two
had. She thought how lucky Faith was to have a mother
obviously devoted to the church, a Christian woman who
wouldn’t do things to hurt her own family.
The older woman smiled back. “Well, welcome, dear.
I’m sure my daughter will take good care of you.”
Faith shrugged at Rachel as her mother immediately
turned back to her own discussion with another member.
27
“Oh, there’s Kathleen. Come on. I’ll introduce her.
You’ll like each other.”
They headed across the room. Rachel felt like the
people were watching her. Actually most of them were.
It wasn’t every week that a new member came. “Hey,
Kathleen, I want you to meet Rachel.”
Kathleen was standing next to her mother and turned
to greet her friend, Faith. She eyed Rachel and smiled.
“Well, another convert,” she said. “How did you come to
know The Truth?”
Rachel wasn’t sure what to answer. “I listen to the
radio program.”
Kathleen nodded, glancing at Faith. “So, you’re really
new, huh?”
“This is my first time here,” Rachel said. “But I’ve
been reading a lot of the church literature. And I have my
own Bible.” She held up her white zippered Bible to show
them. They both nodded.
“Can you show me the ladies room?” Rachel asked.
“It was a long ride from Maine, and my Mom got lost
trying to find this place.”
“Sure, this way,” Kathleen said.
There was an elderly woman in the rest room
combing her hair. When Rachel stood close to the mirror
to put on some lipstick, the woman snapped at her. “We
don’t allow harlots in our church!”
“What?” Rachel said, startled.
“Meet Alice,” Faith said.
“That’s Mrs. Andrews to you, young lady,” the woman
reprimanded.
“Mrs. Andrews,” Faith repeated. “Rachel is new. She
doesn’t know about our rules yet. Don’t you think it
might be better to let the ministers tell her?” Faith knew
she was being a little disrespectful, but she was also right
28
and Alice knew she wasn’t supposed to offend one of the
new recruits.
“Humph!” Alice said, picking up her bag and Bible and
leaving the restroom. Both Kathleen and Faith burst out
laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Rachel asked.
“Did you see her face? I can’t believe you said that to
her. Don’t you know she’s our elder?” Kathleen said to
Faith.
“So what? She was wrong and she knew it. What’s
she going to do? Tell people what she said to Rachel?”
“You’re braver than I am,” Kathleen said.
“I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “Did I do
something wrong?”
“It’s the lipstick,” Faith said. “Look around. Did you
see any make-up on any of the ladies out there?”
“Well, I didn’t notice. Everyone looks dressed up for
church.”
“Women aren’t allowed to wear make-up,” Kathleen
said.
“But we’re not supposed to tell you that,” Faith
injected. “Only the ministers can tell new people the
rules.”
“Yeah, so they don’t get scared away,” Kathleen
added.
“I don’t understand,” Rachel said. “Why can’t women
wear make-up?”
“It’s in the Bible. Only harlots wear make-up. Don’t
worry, you’ll hear all about it soon enough. Just wipe off
the lipstick so no one else says anything.”
Rachel wiped it off. Faith stepped closer when
Kathleen was in the stall and whispered. “Don’t sweat it.
I wear lipstick when I’m not here, but no one knows. It’s
no big deal. Just a bunch of rules for church.” She nodded
at Rachel.
29
In came the young girl who’d run by Rachel earlier.
“Hey, slow down,” Faith said, grabbing the girl’s arm.
“Where’s your mother?”
“Let go!” the girl said, pulling away. “I don’t have to
listen to you.” The girl ran out of the restroom.
“Little brat,” Faith said. Kathleen was washing her
hands. “Come on, Faith,” she said.
Faith looked at Rachel. “Justina—the ministers little
girl. She gets away with murder.”
Rachel nodded and said, “Oh.”
“It’s time for services to start. Come on. You can sit
with us.”
As the girls reached their seats near the back of the
room, a man stood at the podium and asked everyone to
stand. People pulled out hymnals and several songs were
sung. Rachel didn’t recognize any of them and they were
difficult melodies to follow. The words sounded like
psalms from the Bible but she wasn’t sure. Everyone sang
boisterously. It was a happy sound, especially to Rachel.
She glanced at her two new friends feeling a warm glow
inside. Maybe, now, she was finally home.
As they sang hymns, Rachel noticed her mother and
two brothers on the other side of the room. She got a
knot in her stomach and looked back at the hymnal. How
long would this last, she wondered. How long before her
mother got bored and moved on to some new church?
At the end of the songs a man gave a long prayer
asking the Lord to open the minds of those present, to
pour out his Holy Spirit on God’s Children, and to correct
any deviation in any member’s attitude. “Amen” everyone
said and sat down.
First there was a sermonette. Apparently it was given
by a minister in training, a young man who looked little
older than Rachel. His presentation lasted about fifteen
minutes and he sat down. She wasn’t sure what his
30
message was, but he quoted from numerous scriptures.
People turned to them in their Bibles and followed along.
When he finished, more songs were sung and then an
older man stepped to the podium. “That’s the pastor,”
Faith whispered. “Mr. Driscoll.”
The man had a thick English accent. “He’s from
Australia,” Kathleen whispered.”
His sermon lasted three hours. It was nearly five
o’clock when he finally wrapped up. Theme: Lean not to
thine own understanding. He referred often to scriptures
and the whole room took their Bibles and turned to the
scriptures to follow along as he read the passages.
Sometimes pages shuffled after he began reading as some
younger person had difficulty locating the scripture.
Rachel turned to the passages, too, in her white
zippered Bible. If she couldn’t locate it quickly enough,
she pretended she’d found it and read along, making a
mental note to memorize the order of the books of the
Bible before the next meeting.
The message was clear: you can’t understand the
truth on your own. You need the Holy Spirit. He
admonished the congregation not to offend any of these
little ones. Rachel figured he was referring to herself and
her family, as new members. Faith nodded to Kathleen as
if to say, “See, I was right to tell Alice off.” Kathleen
shrugged.
Mr. Driscoll explained God’s Plan to the audience. “It
is only through God’s Apostle, Russell W. Sherburne, that
we can know The Truth,” he said. He went in to a lengthy
story about Russell’s conversion and how he grew the
flock of God’s Children and began doing The Work—
God’s Work.
Russell was the man on the radio. Rachel had never
thought about him, personally. Now she was learning
what a wonderful man he really was—and that he was
special, too. He was God’s Apostle. That explained why
31
his words and his voice were so soothing to her on those
many lonely nights in the car. God was speaking to her
through Russell W. Sherburne. She began to realize how
blessed she was. Something special was happening to her.
She was one of the chosen few.
Well, these were her thoughts during the sermon.
Afterward, Faith and Kathleen explained to her that only
converted people actually were chosen. “What do you
mean?” Rachel asked.
“Well, you have to be born again. Don’t worry.
You’ll learn all about it,” Faith said. “Besides, we’re not
old enough yet. You have to be an adult to be a Child of
God. We can only profess to be a Child of God until
then.”
Rachel was confused, but confident it would all make
sense eventually. She hadn’t read about this in any of the
literature she’d received from the church. They sang
several more hymns and prayers at the end of the sermon.
The pastor closed with an admonition to pray for Mrs.
Dugan who was sick.
Kathleen and Faith chatted for a while and Rachel
stood up. She noticed another young woman a few seats
up. Kathleen said, “That’s Wilma.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Rachel asked.
Faith and Kathleen looked at each other with concern.
“We’ll introduce you,” Faith suggested. “I always try to
talk to her.”
They made their way to Wilma, who was sitting
listlessly in a wheelchair. Despite her aged and tired
appearance, Rachel thought the woman must not be too
much older than she, perhaps twenty or so.
“Hi, Wilma. We have a new friend—Rachel. She’s
from Maine.”
“How do you do?” Wilma said, holding out her hand
to shake Rachel’s.
32
“I’m fine,” Rachel said. “It’s nice to meet you.” Rachel
noticed that Wilma’s hand was limp and reminded her of a
dog’s paw, extended waiting for you to do all the work of
shaking it.
Wilma nodded and looked down. “We’ll see you
next week,” Faith said, pulling Rachel away. “We don’t
like to tire her out,” Faith whispered.
“What’s wrong with her?” Rachel asked again.
Kathleen answered, “Don’t know. She has some
medical problems.”
Faith and Kathleen seemed to have stuff to talk about,
so Rachel moved among the friendly group by herself. The
young girl who’d run by earlier stood by a woman in the
front. Rachel surmised it was the child’s mother and the
wife of the Pastor who’d given the sermon. She decided
to introduce herself.
“Hi, my name is Rachel,” she said. “This is my first
time here.”
The woman smiled at Rachel. “Welcome, dear.
Where are you from?”
“Standish, Maine. I’ve been listening to the radio
program for years and read most of the literature. I even
completed the Bible course.”
The woman looked at her with surprise, and perhaps
disbelief. This was a young girl, and the course was over
50 chapters. “Well, that’s very interesting. I suspect there
are some things you have yet to learn.”
“I am anxious to learn,” Rachel said. “Especially about
becoming a Child of God. How do I do that?”
“You can’t decide that, dear. Only God decides who
is called and chosen.”
Rachel felt a twinge of rejection. The woman sensed
it and quickly added, “You need to counsel with a minister.
It takes time. Be patient.” She reached over to pat
Rachel’s hand reassuringly. “We can’t comprehend The
33
Truth all at once. Soon you will understand that. God will
reveal The Truth to you as you are able to take it.”
Rachel nodded. Her joy at finding God’s true church
seemed to fade a little. There was a small voice inside that
doubted. Soon she’d learn to recognize that doubting
demon and purge it from her mind, but for now, she was
still a babe. She knew she had much to learn. She was
eager to do so. “I intend to be a Child of God,” Rachel
said firmly to the minister’s wife.
“Good for you,” the woman said, then turned to her
daughter who was pulling on her sleeve for attention.
Rachel made her way back to Kathleen and Faith.
“We have to go now,” she said. “I hope to be back next
week.”
“Great,” both girls said. “Faith was just telling me she
wants to get her own place after graduation,” Kathleen
stated. “What are you doing?”
Rachel hadn’t thought much about school. It was her
dream to go to college but now that her mother had
moved just a few weeks prior to graduation, she doubted
she’d even get her high school diploma, but she didn’t
want to tell her new friends about all that. “I need to find
a place to live, too,” Rachel said, surprising herself. She’d
often thought about living on her own but never openly
verbalized it.
“Well, I want out, too,” Kathleen said. “I can’t stand
living at home another day. Maybe we could pool our
resources and find a place together. With the three of us,
we could probably afford an apartment. Are you
interested?”
Faith looked at Rachel expectantly. Rachel smiled.
“You bet.”
“Then all we need is permission,” Faith said.
“From our parents?” Rachel asked.
Kathleen laughed. “That’s the easy part. No, from
the ministers.”

by Mary Ellen Humphrey

Chapter 3
Beloved, believe not every spirit,
but try the spirits whether they are of God:
because many false prophets are gone out into the world.
I John 4:1

Rachel could hardly wait for the next Saturday service.
The idea of living on her own was not only exciting, but
a way to escape the nightmare that had been her life for as
long as she could remember. When she told her mother
what she was thinking, she expected another blow-up. To
her surprise, her mother had simply shrugged. “Fine,”
she’d said. “I really am anxious for you to go. There’s no
reason for you to stay with me now.”
Now, Rachel thought, now that she’d soon be
eighteen and the child support checks would stop. Now
that she’d taken her away from her father, kept her from
graduating from high school, taken everything away from
her. Now her mother was done with her.
Rachel felt tightness in her chest. Any words she
wanted to say were stuck deep inside. It had happened
before. Unable to speak. Dizzy. Faint. Rachel retreated
to her room and took her white Bible from the stand next
to her bed. She turned to her favorite verse and began to
read it. I John 4:7-8: Beloved, let us love one another, for love
is of God, and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth
God. He that loveth not knoweth no God, for God is love.
35
These words calmed her, soothed her and gave her
strength. She told herself, I’ll soon be born of God, and I’ll
soon know God’s love. She remembered her grandmother
who’d given it to her on her twelfth birthday. A large tear
fell down her cheek. “I miss you Gram,” she whispered,
holding the Bible close to her chest.
Rachel’s older brother left to return to her father that
Saturday morning before she and her mother and younger
brother headed to Manchester for church services. Rachel
cried during the trip as she sat in the back seat. She would
miss him. Part of her wanted to go back, too. But her
mother would never allow that. And now that she’d found
the True Church, she had to stay. God was calling her.
Her mother glared ahead. as she drove, her hands
tapping angrily on the steering wheel. She’d been in one of
her moods all day. Her younger brother sat in the front,
looking worried, his jaw clenched, his eyes bloodshot. It
was a long, silent trip. Just before they arrived, her
mother exploded, “I don’t understand you kids!” she
yelled. “I do all this for you. I bring you to God’s True
Church, and you don’t obey me. You don’t respect your
mother. I don’t understand you!”
Rachel recognized that crazed look. Despite the
many times her mother had done it, she still cringed in
fear. It was the power of her mothers’ animosity that
always shocked her. How could her own mother hate her
so? Rachel was convinced there must be something
terribly wrong with herself. It must be her fault—not her
mother’s. No one else’s mother treated them this way.
She’d never seen another mother like this and she’d
watched closely the mother-daughter interactions of
others trying to figure it out.
Her brother glanced her a hateful, why’d-you-upsether-
again look. Rachel looked down, hoping they would
soon arrive. She knew there was nothing she could say to
36
change her mother’s mood. She just hoped that she
wouldn’t sabotage her plan out of spite.
Rachel kept her hand on the door handle ready to
jump out. Her mother drove too fast, missed a stop sign,
nearly crashed into another car. Her brother clenched his
fists and his jaw. His whole body tightened like a giant
knot. Rachel thought he was surely suffering the most
harm from her mother, even though he was her favorite.
Look what she’s doing to him, Rachel thought sadly. He quit
school. He works at whatever she tells him to do during the
day. He resents me and our older brother. He hates our
father. He’s just plain messed up. She has messed him up so
badly.
As soon as the car stopped in the parking lot, Rachel
jumped out and ran into the building without a word. She
was eager to find her two new friends. They were waiting
for her, too.
“What took so long?” Faith asked.
“It’s been a tough ride,” Rachel answered.
“Well, come on. We’re supposed to counsel with the
minister today. What did your mother say?” Kathleen
said.
“I can move out anytime,” Rachel said, not mentioning
that she had her suitcase and meager possessions in the
back of her mother’s station wagon. Whatever happened
today, her mother had made it very clear, and she wasn’t
taking her back home with her to Standish.
The three girls were excited. Jordan, the large official
greeter man joked with Faith and Kathleen. Rachel stood
off a little. But he reached for her and did his big
handshake deal again and pulled her close. He also hugged
both Faith and Kathleen. They didn’t seem to mind.
Rachel tried to smile.
The three girls were led into a small counseling room
off to the side of the main meeting hall. There were only a
37
few minutes before the service would start, so the
minister asked them to come back after the sermon.
All through the sermon Rachel was distracted. Even
though she’d often dreamed of running away now that she
was really going to be on her own she was frightened. She
looked around the room. These people will be my new
family, she thought. Anything will be better than what I have
now.
The sermon this week was delivered by another man.
He didn’t have the charisma like Mr. Driscoll. Faith
explained to Rachel that Mr. Driscoll was the Pastor. He
oversaw several churches and only came to Manchester
occasionally. Today he was in Boston and their speaker
was Mr. Critchett, the Local Elder.
Mr. Critchett talked about Satan and the bad
influences of the world. “The World” was a different
concept to these folks. Rachel sensed something was bad
about the world.
“Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born
of God,” Mr. Critchett quoted as everyone turned to the
book of I John. He continued, “By this we know that we
love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his
commandments.”
He admonished the audience, “Are you a Child of
God? Do you love God and keep his commandments?”
He quoted from I John 4, “believe not every spirit, but
try the spirits whether they are of God: because many
false prophets are gone out into the world.”
Critchett explained there could only be one True
Church. There are so many diverse denominations, he
said, that teach different things. They can’t all be right, he
explained. Only one can be right—only one can be the
True Church. How do you know which one? You must
try the spirits, he explained.
The truth was tested by the revelations of God’s
Apostle, Russell W. Sherburne. “You are privileged to be
38
chosen as a Child of God. What are you doing with that
privilege and that honor?” He was demanding, almost
accusing the audience.
Rachel felt uncomfortable. This was the man they
would be counseling with after the service. She noticed
that Faith and Kathleen didn’t seem fazed at all.
When the sermon ended and it was time for more
hymns Rachel whispered to Faith, “When do they take up
an offering?”
“Oh, we don’t do that,” Faith explained. “Members
tithe and give special offerings but not at regular services.”
The three girls hurried to be first in line for counseling
when the last prayer was given. Mrs. Andrews was ahead
of them in line. She gave the girls a disgusted look.
“What’s bugging her?” Kathleen asked.
“It’s Rachel’s skirt—see how short it is,” Faith pointed
out.
Rachel suddenly felt embarrassed. She hadn’t noticed
the women and girls wore their dresses well below their
knees. She’d thought her skirt was modest. It came just
to her knees. It was in fact longer than the current fashion
because she’d already let the hem down as far as it would
go. “I didn’t know that,” Rachel said, tugging at her skirt
to get it as low as possible.
“Don’t worry,” Faith said. “It’s not a big deal.”
Mr. Critchett, the Local Elder, sat behind a table and
motioned for the three girls to sit in front. He studied
them for an awkward moment before speaking. When
Faith began to say something he held up his hand to
indicate not to talk. “I know why you’re here,” he said.
“Your father told me.”
Rachel glanced at Kathleen, who sat quietly. The two
other girls looked expectantly at the man, hopeful he
wouldn’t dash their plans. “You know that having your
own place means you will have to be responsible, as
adults?”
39
Faith and Kathleen nodded. He looked at Rachel.
“And you,” he said, “you are new to The Church. Are you
going to bring your worldly ways to these two Christian
girls?”
Rachel was insulted. “I study my Bible,” she said
humbly. “I plan to become a Child of God soon.”
He grinned. “That so.”
“Where do you plan to live?” he asked the girls.
The two started talking at the same time. “We have
pooled our money,” Faith said.
“My mother said I could use her car this week to find
an apartment,” Kathleen said.
“You have to find jobs,” he said.
“I have working papers,” Kathleen said.
“I graduated from high school last week,” Faith said.
“We should be able to find work without much trouble.”
He looked at Rachel. “I have always had a job,” she
said. “I’m sure I can find one here, too.”
“And what about men?” he demanded while, looking
at each girl intently. “Are you planning to entertain men in
your new apartment?”
“Of course not,” they said in unison.
“Humph!” His look said more than his words. “You
are not allowed to have any men in your apartment at any
time for any reason. Is that understood?”
They nodded.
“If it were up to me, I would never allow this,” he
said. “Mr. Driscoll has given his okay and I take my orders
from him. But I will be watching you. Women should be
under direct supervision. If you step out of line or give me
any reason, any reason at all, you will be sent right back
home.”
“We won’t,” Faith said.
“Since your parents have all said it was okay with
them as long as you continue to attend church functions,
and the Pastor has agreed, then you may find your own
40
place. You will be on probation. If there is any
problem,” he said, “ANY problem at all, you’ll have to go
back home.”
“I brought my stuff,” Rachel said.
“On the Sabbath?” the Elder stated. He shook his
head. “Work is not allowed on the Sabbath. You have a
lot to learn, young lady.”
Rachel blushed.
“I have arranged for Audrey Sinclair to help you. You
can stay with her while you find your own place. But
make sure you don’t impose on her. You must pay your
own way like adults, or it’s home you go. Got that?”
They all nodded.
“Who’s Audrey?” Rachel asked as they left the
counseling room.
“She’s a Deaconess. You’ll like her,” Kathleen said.
“Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
“I don’t think Mr. Critchett likes me.” Rachel said as
they gathered their stuff.
“He doesn’t like any women,” Faith said.
Kathleen nudged her arm. “That’s not true, Faith. He
loves his wife and daughter.”
“Yeah? Why does he always pick on women? How
many of the men has he publicly chastised? And how
come the young men can have their own apartments but
he puts us through the third-degree?”
“He’s chastised plenty of men,” Kathleen stated
doubtfully. “But if you talk like that, and someone hears
you, it will be the end of our plan. Cool it.”
“Okay,” Faith said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I
overheard my parents talking about Mr. Critchett, and
they said he doesn’t like dealing with women.” She
shrugged.
Audrey was the woman who sat at the reception
table. She was friendly. Her dark eyes sparkled. Her hair
41
was pinned back in a tight bun disguising its actual nearwaist
length. She wore dark colors, a long dress and
jacket.
The girls approached the table. She was expecting
them. “When can you come?” she asked with a southern
drawl.
“I can come today,” Rachel said.
Audrey looked surprised. “Well, that’s fine. I haven’t
set up your bedroom yet, but if you don’t mind the couch,
you’re welcome. Wade has to bunk with his brother
while you’re at our apartment.”
Wade was the oldest of Audrey’s three sons. Faith
and Kathleen explained to Rachel that Audrey was a
Deaconess, which meant she was privileged to serve. She
had to leave her husband when she became a Child of
God. It was a divorce and remarriage thing. The Church
didn’t allow anyone more than one marriage, except in the
case of death.
Rachel immediately liked Audrey. She was friendly,
open, and honest. When Rachel fetched her suitcase
from her mother’s station wagon, Audrey asked where the
rest of her stuff was. “That’s it,” Rachel said.
“That’s all you have?” Audrey asked, eyeing the small,
gray, battered suitcase.
Rachel shrugged. “We moved so many times, I just
kept less and less. It’s everything I need.”
“Well, come on. Let’s get you settled.”
Kathleen said, “I’ll see you on Monday morning. We’ll
start looking for our apartment and jobs.”
Faith agreed. “I’m taking a bus down. My folks will
move my stuff once we find a place. This is so exciting,”
she said. The girls hugged good-bye.
Rachel watched as her mother and younger brother
drove off. Neither had said good-bye to her. She figured
her brother didn’t want to upset her mother and didn’t
hold it against him. She hoped he’d be all right. She got
42
into the back seat of Audrey’s station wagon next to her
youngest son, Randy. He was five. He gave her a big
smile. She smiled back.
Audrey had prepared a wonderful dinner that was
waiting for them when they arrived. She had invited some
of the widows from The Church, too, including Alice. By
the time everyone left and the dishes were cleaned up, the
three boys had gone to bed. As Audrey pulled out the
sofa-bed, she said, “This might not be too comfortable, but
we’ll move Wade out of his bedroom tomorrow and you
can have some privacy.”
“That’s okay,” Rachel said. “I hate to make him move
out of his room.” She had noticed that Wade was sullen
during the evening and seemed to be watching people,
especially her.
Wade was Audrey’s oldest son, nearly fifteen. But he
seemed much older. His voice was deep, well past “the
change.” And his demeanor was always quiet, thoughtful.
He seemed wise beyond his years. Perhaps he’d become
“the man of the house” and felt the burden of worrying
for his mother and two younger brothers. Perhaps he
missed his father who sounded like a very nice person.
Rachel suddenly missed her own father, wondering
what he was doing, was her brother okay, did they miss
her, too. She returned her thoughts to the present and
surmised Wade didn’t appreciate giving up his room to her
and her two friends, even though it would be for only a
short time, she hoped.
“He’s used to it,” Audrey said. “It’s part of the deal.”
“The deal?”
“He gets his own room when it’s not needed for
brethren. Otherwise he’d always share a bedroom with
his brothers. Part of my job is to provide a place for
brethren in need. The church pays the rent here. He
understands that.”
43
Rachel wondered if he understood. Or maybe he
tolerated it. Maybe he didn’t like it at all, and she wouldn’t
blame him. But that was none of her business.
After the bed was made up, Audrey sat down with a
glass of wine and the two chatted until quite late. Rachel
was curious about this outgoing woman. “How did you
get here in New Hampshire?” Rachel asked when Audrey
said she was from Louisiana.
Audrey explained that she had been married briefly
before meeting her husband, the father of her three sons.
Even though that first marriage had lasted only a few
months, it none-the-less counted, and she was living in sin
with her second husband. He didn’t understand any of
this, of course, not being a Child of God. He was
heartbroken when the church moved her and their three
sons from Louisiana to New Hampshire.
“It’s a test of my faith,” Audrey said. “I know that
God will someday get me and my husband back together.
My husband promised to wait for me no matter how long
it takes.”
Rachel admired Audrey’s strength and faith. She
wondered how she could have left a man she obviously
loved so much.
“I know he will wait,” Audrey said. “It’s only been
three years. When we are re-united, it will be better than
before. God will reward us. I’m hoping that my husband
will also be chosen as a Child of God. That’s my prayer,
every day, morning and night.”
Audrey took another sip of wine. Rachel noted that
she’d had several glasses over the evening and during
dinner. “We left three years ago, but God promises to
reward the faithful,” Audrey said. “I have to prove myself
as a faithful servant of God.”
“You’re a Deaconess?” Rachel asked. “What does
that mean?”
44
“It’s the highest honor for women in the church,”
Audrey explained. I was ordained a year after we arrived.
My responsibilities include helping with women’s needs in
the church, and providing hospitality for visiting brethren.
I do a lot of work with the elderly widows like Mrs.
Andrews.”
Rachel frowned at the name. Audrey laughed. “Alice
is one of my more challenging charges.”
“Where are the families of the widows?” Rachel
asked.
“Most of them are alone or abandoned. Some of
them can’t understand why their mother would join this
church. If you ask me, it’s most often about the money.”
“The money?” Rachel asked.
“Yes. The widows have their wills changed to leave
everything to The Church. That’s part of the deal. They
get cared for in the church for the rest of their lives.
That’s why they are relocated here, so we can take care of
them. And keep their greedy relatives away from them,
too.”
“They leave all their money to The Church?”
“It’s God’s will to do The Work.”
Monday morning Kathleen arrived a little before nine.
The two girls giggled a lot. Audrey seemed pleased,
feeding them muffins and juice. Faith would arrive at the
bus station at eleven. Until then, Kathleen and Rachel
scoured the newspaper looking at apartment ads. Most
were too expensive. Between them they had about $75.
It would have to last until their first paycheck, whenever
that would be.
After exhausting the apartment ads, they surveyed the
help wanted ads. Kathleen circled a few.
“I brought my working papers,” Kathleen said. “What
about you? You need them if you don’t have a high school
diploma and you’re under eighteen.”
45
“I’ll be eighteen in July,” Rachel said. “We moved a
few weeks before graduation.”
“Write to the school. They’ll send you the working
papers,” Kathleen offered.
“Why did you move so near to graduation?” Audrey
asked.
Rachel shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about it.
Audrey glanced at Rachel. “There’s stationary in the
desk drawer,” Audrey said. “Go ahead and write to your
school. The sooner you get the papers, the better.”
Rachel drafted a note to her old school principle. She
asked for working papers and gave Audrey’s mailing
address. She took out some change to pay for the stamp
but Audrey protested. They mailed the letter on the way
to the bus station.
Faith had brought a suitcase which was stored in the
baggage compartment under the bus so they had to wait
until everyone had exited the bus to retrieve it. They
were anxious to start their search.
At the end of Monday, they returned to Audrey’s
place. None of the prospective apartments had panned
out. Landlords didn’t rent to single girls.
The job market hadn’t fared any better, but there
were still several contacts they hadn’t been able to reach
yet. Only a little discouraged, they told Audrey about
their day, helping set the table for dinner.
Audrey’s three boys didn’t say much when the girls
were around. The two older ones scowled and
complained constantly to their mother. They resented
having to give up their space during the visit. Randy, who
was barely five, seemed to take to the girls. He would
often crawl in between them while they talked. He
especially took a liking to Rachel. “You’re my girlfriend,”
he said.
Audrey laughed. “You’re too young for a girlfriend,”
she said.
46
“I want to marry Rachel,” he asserted.
Rachel was embarrassed.
Audrey laughed again. “You’re too young,” she
restated. “Why don’t you go play with your brothers and
leave the girls alone.”
Randy reluctantly left the room. “He tends to get
attached to people,” Audrey explained. “It’s innocent
enough. He just likes you.”
The next day’s search for work and an apartment
didn’t turn out any better and the girls were beginning to
worry. Would they find a place? Would they find jobs?
As instructed by Mr. Critchett, they were paying Audrey
ten dollars a week to help with the costs. She protested,
but reluctantly accepted the money. At the end of the
first week, they were left with $65. They were
determined not to give up.
Thursday night, just as dinner ended, there was a
knock at the door. It was Mr. Critchett. He looked at the
three girls and asked Audrey to leave so he could talk to
them. He didn’t look happy.
“Why are you still here?” he demanded.
“We are still looking for an apartment,” Faith
answered. “It’s more difficult than we anticipated.”
“But we have some leads,” Kathleen added. “It won’t
be much longer.”
The man turned to Rachel. His face was hard. His
eyes dark. “And you?”
Rachel felt her stomach tighten. “Uh, I’m trying, too,”
she stuttered.
“Your mother told me about you,” he said, accusation
in his tone. “She said you are very selfish. She said you
are lazy. She said you are trouble. She said you’d take
advantage of Mrs. Sinclair.”
47
“I, I, we paid Audrey,” Rachel said, surprised and hurt.
Her mother. She should have known she’d never be free
of her mother, even when she got her own place.
“You have one week,” he said, turning to the door.
“If you aren’t out of here in one week, you’re all going
home.”
He opened the door and looked back to the girls.
“Tell Audrey to send Wade out to the car. I need to talk
to him.” He slammed the door.
The girls looked at each other. Rachel bit her lip
holding back the tears. “Hey, don’t worry. We’ll find
something,” Faith said.
Kathleen sat next to Rachel. “We should pray about
it. That’s what we did wrong. We didn’t pray and ask
God to help up us find the right place and the right jobs.”
“I told you he doesn’t like women,” Faith whispered.
Kathleen glared at her friend.
“I’ll go tell Audrey to send Wade outside,” Faith said.
They heard Audrey call Wade from his bedroom. “I
don’t want to go talk to him!” Wade yelled. They heard
Audrey’s muffled voice. “Come on, Wade. Don’t act like
that. He just wants to talk to you. That’s an honor for
the minister of God to talk to you.”
Wade passed by the girls with a hard look on his face.
He glanced back at his mother. “You don’t have a clue, do
you Mother?” he said.
“Go!” Audrey said firmly, pointing outside.
The girls told Audrey what Mr. Critchett had said,
that they should be out by the end of the week. They
promised they would be.
“I enjoy having you,” Audrey said. “I don’t want you
to feel pressured to leave, but we must obey the
ministers.”
Neither girl mentioned Mr. Critchett’s comments to
Rachel about her mother. They seemed to understand.
48
Wade didn’t return for nearly two hours. Everyone
had gone to bed. Rachel heard him close the door and
walk to his room. She still didn’t fall asleep very quickly,
even in a safe place. Her mind was in turmoil over the
minister’s comments. Lazy. Selfish. Trouble. Was that
what her new friends were going to think of her? She
decided her only hope was if her mother tired of this
church as she had so many others and moved on.
Meanwhile, she would try to hang on. Knowing her
mother, it shouldn’t take too much longer.
Friday night, Rachel was impressed with the
preparations Audrey made for the Sabbath. All the food
was cooked in advance for both the dinner meal and
Saturdays. Clothes were laid out for services. The
television was off. Church literature was on the table to
be read by Audrey and her sons as they discussed God’s
laws. Even Faith and Kathleen seemed more religious.
Rachel was beginning to understand the ways of The
Church. You weren’t supposed to work on the Sabbath
which was Friday night at sunset until Saturday night at
sunset. You studied your Bible and that required, of
course, the guidance of the Church literature. You were
supposed to pray. No work was allowed so everything
was prepared in advance. It was a lot of effort for the
women. Even the table was set for tomorrow night’s meal
after the two services, morning and afternoon.
The three girls were excited, too, because Friday had
been more successful. Kathleen had found a promising ad
for a “Penthouse Apartment” that fit their budget and
when she called, the landlady was willing to rent to single
girls. And Faith had found a factory that hired her
instantly. She would start Monday morning.
The apartment was within walking distance from
where Faith worked. She said the personnel director told
her there were more openings and to send her two
friends right in. The pay was $1.35 per hour, and if all
49
three worked, they would have plenty of money. Things
were definitely looking better.
It was getting late, though, and they’d have only
enough time to see the apartment before the Sabbath
started at sundown. So they piled into Kathleen’s
mother’s station wagon and headed towards Penacook,
NH. Penthouse sounded so nice. The landlady was
standing in front of the old building when the girls arrived.
Kathleen introduced herself. The woman eyed the other
two girls, turned to the door and said, “This way.”
They went up two flights of stairs. The Penthouse
Apartment was actually a glorified attic. There were
slanted walls with two windows at each gable end. But it
had a bedroom, a living room, kitchen and bath. The girls
didn’t notice the windows were wide open and it was still
very warm. The price in the paper was $25. They could
afford that.
“We’ll take it,” the girls said after a brief survey.
“Great,” the woman replied. “I need a week’s rent in
advance, and you can move in as soon as you want. That
will be $35.00.”
“Thirty-five? The ad says twenty-five,” Kathleen said.
“That is the price for two people. There are three of
you. It costs more, you know, for utilities and stuff.”
Kathleen looked at Faith. They only had $65.00.
“You can pay me the deposit now,” the landlady said,
“and the first week’s rent when you move in.”
“Can we move in on Sunday?”
“Sure. Just bring the money. I’ll meet you here with
the key. Nine o’clock?”
“Great,” Kathleen said, handing the woman thirty-five
dollars.
“Where are we going to get the extra five dollars?”
Rachel asked.
“Not to worry,” Faith said. “My folks will lend it to
us.”